


Toccata

by AstridContraMundum



Series: After-comers Cannot Guess The Beauty Been [9]
Category: Endeavour (TV)
Genre: AU of S7 with more hijinks and a much lower death toll, Episode: s07e01 Oracle, Episode: s07e03 Zenana, Established Relationship, M/M, Road Trips, light angst at the beginning, lovers to colleagues, yielding to a sort of dark rom com
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-25
Updated: 2020-10-27
Packaged: 2021-02-27 04:42:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 23,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22351267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AstridContraMundum/pseuds/AstridContraMundum
Summary: Not long after Endeavour signs a new contract with the publishing firm of Talenti & Talenti, Bixby begins to notice a few odd coincidences ...
Relationships: Endeavour Morse & Fred Thursday, Endeavour Morse & Ludo Talenti, Endeavour Morse & Violetta Talenti, Joss Bixby/Endeavour Morse
Series: After-comers Cannot Guess The Beauty Been [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1152587
Comments: 70
Kudos: 46





	1. "You only get one go around the board."

It wasn’t so terrible, really.

The bookshop was warm and diffused with a comforting yellow light, as, outside, the winter rain beat steadily against the windows. It was one of those cold and drifting days between Christmas and New Year’s, when the festivities of one holiday were waning, but those of the next not yet begun.

The shop, however, was bustling with movement and with life—full of people queuing up with a sense of purpose, full of the scent of paper and of coffee, and full of dark maplewood shelves that reached up and up—so high that they seemed almost to arch as they met the vaulted ceilings—each one crammed with books, promising worlds in which to escape and thoughts that were not his own, between pages soft and crisp.

It wasn’t so terrible, really.

All Endeavour had to do was to sit there.

All he had to do was to deal with one person in the queue at a time, and somehow he’d get through. 

He knew he'd have to face it all sooner or later. Turner, his editor, had been on him about it for months, the book signing tour.

The whole idea seemed ridiculous to Endeavour—there were his words, right there in his books, if people wanted to read them.

Why would they need to see him, too? He was not his words.

Sometimes he wished that he was. Sometimes he was glad that he wasn’t.

But it wasn’t so terrible, really.

Because they didn’t _really_ want him to speak. Not really.

Mostly, they wanted to talk about themselves. About their own troubles and heartbreaks, about times in their lives when his words had been a help to them.

God only knew how.

Endeavour didn’t quite understand this, their need to exorcize the worst times in their lives by speaking of them, by framing them into sentences and stories. But, fortunately, he didn’t have to understand. He only had to listen and to pretend that he understood. That seemed to be enough.

Until the next person stepped up to the table and placed an open book before him. And the whole process began anew.

Oh, hell.

What was puzzling was how many of them wanted to talk of their own writing, of their struggles and their labors, of their moral conundrums.

Was is right to change their work to make it more marketable? Or should they hold fast to their own authentic voices, publishing houses be damned?

But Endeavour knew nothing of such matters. Such questions had been taken entirely out of out of his hands, after all. Bix had mailed his notebook off to Turner without him ever knowing a thing about it.

And when Endeavour _did_ sign the contract, his motives had been purely mercenary. He could remember the day in perfect clarity—sitting on the carpet of the drawing room in the house in Lorraine, in the house that was not yet his home, poring over the paperwork in disbelief.

In the end he had signed, not out of any wish to share his poetry with the world, or any such artistic balderdash, but solely for the promise of the advance cheque; he had signed, in the end, only for the money, only as an attempt to stumble his way toward a more equal footing with Bix, so as not to feel like a loafer hanging about the place, so as not to feel like just another sponger at his table.

Or worse. 

Endeavour looked up, then, and in front of him stood an elderly lady in a lavender cardigan—she, it transpired, fell into the easiest category of all. She had no interest in him or his poems, whatsoever: she was buying the book and having it signed for someone else as a gift.

The beauty of these sorts of people was that they often told him exactly what they wanted him to write, and this lady, true to form, did not disappoint.

“To Jessica,” she commanded. “Best of luck with your work.”

Endeavour smiled and did as he was told.

And it wasn’t so terrible, really. 

Not with the reassurance of the flat, smooth bottle in his coat pocket, resting solidly against his thigh.

It wasn’t as if he didn’t know enough not to repeat the mistakes of that first tour, years ago, when it had all just been too much, when one of Turner’s public relations people had to help him as he stumbled and slurred his way out the back door of a bookshop in London, where he had plopped himself down on the kerb, watching as the world veered curiously off its axis and the street rotated beneath him.

No. He had found the perfect balance now. He had had just enough Scotch to keep the world at a comfortable distance, but not so much that he wouldn’t be able to remain somewhat sharp, not so much that he couldn’t sit straight in his chair, smiling vacuously, not so much that he couldn’t keep up the pretense of being someone else, the _Endeavour Morse_ whose name appeared in an alien font across the cover of the books he signed.

If he took each person in the queue one at a time, .... yes, he’d make it through well enough.

Endeavour kept his eyes trained on the books placed before him; he smiled and he signed and he tried to understand all that the people wanted to tell him—even though there were _too_ many stories, _too_ many faces, _too_ many voices—a steady stream of voices all saying his name as if they knew him, as if he _should_ know them, a steady stream of voices that, nevertheless, he simply couldn’t place.

Until there was one that he could.

“Morse. How are you?”

He flicked his gaze upwards. On the other side of the table, there stood a beautiful woman with a round face and soft and gentle eyes and skin as perfect as velvet.

“Monica,” Endeavour replied.

And what else could he say, other than that acknowledgement?

What else was there to say to a woman who had once knocked quietly on your door, asking for a tenner for the stove?

She had told him her name, and he had told her his, and he had given her the money, and she had promised him a tin opener. As she was leaving, he called out after her, asking for an iron, too, and she closed the door with a ripple of laughter.

_“Really stretching that tenner, aren’t you?”_

And, yes, he was stretching, stretching for what he knew, even then, he could not have. 

What else was there to say to a woman who you once ran into in front of a mattress shop, where the clerk mistook you for husband and wife? And you had lain side by side on a bed on the showroom floor, exchanging shy glances with one another, as if radiant with the ridiculous pantomime of it all.

When Morse had looked into her eyes, he wondered if he might see his own dream reflected there, in those liquid depths. Because, as they lay there, testing out the mattress, he found he could imagine a completely different world. One in which he quit the police and became a teacher, one in which they went away together, went abroad. One in which he loved her and she loved him.

And he wondered if she was thinking the same thing that he was.

What if we weren’t pretending?

What if this was real?

On cold mornings, they had lounged in his single bed, limbs tangled together as the rain beat—just as it did now—outside the window of his dingy little bedsit, which had been made magical by the floral scent of her shampoo, by the warmth of her presence, of her smile.

And then he had disappeared.

Without one word.

What a fraud he was, really. He was supposed to be a poet, but what words had he, really? When it came down to it?

And so he said the only thing he could say.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured.

She huffed a soft laugh. A laugh that was barely a laugh at all, but almost a sigh. He kept his eyes lowered, focused on the book before him, but still he could feel her looking down on the unruly hair at the crown of his head.

What hurt the most was that she had every _right_ to look at him in such a way. Theirs was no casual fling. Monica was not a woman to give her heart or herself lightly. He was a bastard. He had taken comfort in her love and in her arms, and when it all went to hell, he left. He left without one word.

He had told himself he did it to protect her. “They’ll take everything you hold dear,” Todd had said. And then they did. 

But perhaps.... that hadn’t been all the reason. Perhaps he still had some scrap of pride, even then. 

“Sorry? Sorry for what?” she asked. 

“For leaving.”

“Are you?” she asked.

Endeavour hesitated.

“No,” he said.

He might have thought that the word would have made her more impatient still, but, no: she was the same Monica, valuing honesty above all else. At this word, something in her stance seemed to relax, soften, as if she was satisfied she was getting past all of his dissemblances and finally getting to the truth.

Which he knew was all that she wanted.

And no less than she deserved.

“I . . . I wouldn’t have been any good for you,” Endeavour said. “You deserved better.”

“And that was your call to make,” she said, quietly.

And it wasn’t and it was. Because he knew—didn’t he?—that it could not be any other way, even though that sounded like a platitude, even though that sounded false, as if he was making an excuse.

“Yes. Yes, it was. I . . . I wasn't the same.” 

“Who is ever the same?” she asked. “What does that even mean?”

Endeavour said nothing.

“And you couldn’t at least have said goodbye?” she asked.

“I didn’t want you to see me. I was . . .” And Endeavour let the sentence die away.

“You were what?” she prompted.

“I was . . .”

Endeavour smiled wanly, shook his head. Who could say what he was, exactly, in those first confusing days at Lake Silence?

How could he have inflicted her with the sight of him?

“And so you decided I wouldn’t want you back. You decided I wouldn’t want you anymore, and so you decided to cut me off first, spare me the trouble,” Monica supplied. “Is that it, then?”

Endeavour raised and lowered one shoulder, as if to say he couldn’t disagree.

“You think I would have thrown you over that easily, just because you’d had a bit of a rough patch?” she asked. “Is that honestly what you thought of me?”

But _was_ it just a rough patch? Because in those first days at the lake house, he couldn’t escape the feeling that something within him was drastically altered, that there was something wrong that he couldn’t quite name.

It was better to drink and forget about it. He was tired, he was drunk, it would pass. And then Thursday came and tried to convince him to return to Cowley. "I’m not the same," he had said. But how he was different, he could not say.

Perhaps she was right. Perhaps he had been selfish, preferring her to remember him as he was. For there to be someone out there to remember him as he was.

Yes. He had been selfish.

But no. That, too, was a lie.

He looked down at the book before him and the page swam dangerously before his eyes, and this was hell. He had to do better than this. He owed her that much, to keep himself together, to take what she had to say like a man, not to fall to pieces in the middle of Turner’s nightmare of a publicity tour.

“I was angry with you, you know,” she said, so quietly that Endeavour could well believe it. “I was angry for a long time. I deserved to have been thought better of than that. You owed me a goodbye, at least. Or at least you owed me the chance to say goodbye.”

“I know,” Endeavour said.

“I kept your things for you, when the landlord tried to chuck them out. I thought any day now . . . “

She let the words drift off, and he hadn’t thought of that, had he? He knew he was never going back, but she . . . She had waited for him, she was looking for him, at every creak in the hallway, she had cracked her door and looked out, thinking perhaps he was coming back to Oxford, coming back to her . . .

And so. He had wasted even more of her time. God only knew how much.

“But I’m not angry anymore,” she said. “I know you probably don’t care . . but . . ."

“I _do_ care,” Endeavour protested, but she cut across him, as if she had come to deliver a set of words, and was determined to get through with them to the end with good grace. 

“I stopped being angry long ago . . . but when I saw the posters in the window . . . I felt . . . it was just something I had to say. Not for you, but for me. I just wanted you to know.”

He chanced a glance up, and he could see the truth of her words. She looked at peace, she looked as if she had been happy. He had been right, after all, he knew it, she had found someone else, he could see it—not just from the gold band on her finger, but by the glow in her face, a face that was well-loved, loved by someone who was much better for her than he ever could have been.

Someone who she would not have to drag through life like an albatross around her neck.

“Are you happy?” Endeavour ventured.

“Yes,” she said.

And he felt almost weak with the relief of it; he hadn’t realized how much he had been carrying the weight of that for all of these years. He should have known as soon as he saw her that she had forgiven him. She never would have stood in this queue otherwise. She had chosen her vocation as a nurse well; she had not the power to hurt. 

“Are you?” she asked.

“Am I what?”

“Happy?”

Endeavour frowned. 

"Not really. Not at the moment." 

She laughed. It was a laugh traced with nostalgia—his old tactlessness must have reminded her of other days, long ago. And for him, too, it was just the same: In her laugh was something soothing and familiar, like the rain outside the windows.

"No," she said. "This doesn't seem to be quite your thing." 

"No," he agreed, softly.

He looked back down to the book before him.

“Do you really want me to sign this?” he asked.

She smiled then, a smile that was richer now, warmer, a smile revealing the soft dimples in her cheeks. “Don’t tell me you’re going to try to get out of that, too? I waited in this queue an hour, you know.”

And Endeavour smiled back as best he could.

“What do you want me to write?”

“That’s up to you, isn’t it? You’re the writer.”

She was the first person that day to not give him some sort if inkling as to what to say. He wished that she would.

He wasn’t even sure how to sign it. Morse? Endeavour?

And they had lain together in his narrow bed, limbs intertwined under the rough blanket as the rain beat outside, warm in his bedsit that smelled of old paper and shoe polish and dust from the radiator and her shampoo, faintly floral, like spring violets, a trace of faintest indigo in a warmth of yellow.

And why hadn’t he let her call him Endeavour? Why had he ever thought it was so terrible, dropping that wall?

He stared at the page, feeling again a wave of regret.

“Hey now,” Monica said, in that soothing voice with which she spoke to him once long ago. “It’s not so terrible, is it?”

“It’s just . . . I don’t know what to say.”

“Well, then. Best not to say anything, yeah?”

And they had been good at that. At sitting together in silence, she with her knitting and he with his crossword, saying nothing, each inwardly reveling in the fact that they were together. That they, for the moment, were not alone.

“To tell you the truth, I’m not sure if I get what all this is about, anyway,” she said, nodding to the book.

And then Endeavour laughed, and, to his surprise, it was his real and natural laugh. Of course, she wouldn’t. She was as straightforward a soul as he had ever known.

Bix, on the other hand, despite his dislike of literature as a whole, borne out of a childhood horror of Faulkner, had picked his notebook up off the floor out of idle curiosity, and seen what it was all about right away—the crashing of words and the misplaced metaphors and the lost assonance and allusions and illusions.

Because they were just the same, he and Bix. Liars and frauds, the pair of them.

The woman standing behind Monica in the queue shifted her weight from side to side, as if impatient that she was taking so long. Endeavour wondered idly if he should offer to arrange to meet with her sometime, if she wanted to talk. But Monica, it seemed, had said all she had wanted to say.

“Morse. You take care now, all right?” she said, with one last smile. “Don’t be a stranger.”

Morse flinched as she passed by.

Tony had once said exactly the same thing.

And he thought, just as he did then, that a stranger most likely was, in fact, just what he had become.

****

And then the whole damn thing was over. Endeavour managed to extricate himself from a conversation with Turner’s assistant, put his sunglasses on, and went out into the rain. He stood there, by the street sign, reveling in the feel of it, the cold of it, seeping through his coat.

After a few moments, he turned away from the passing crowds, pulled out his bottle, and took a quick drink to steady his nerves. An older woman with a blue umbrella cast him a disapproving glance as she passed, but Endeavour didn’t care; all he could think was, _thank god, thank god, it’s over,_ the words beating in his head in time to the pound of the rain on the street.

Eventually, a blue Jag pulled up slowly, and Bix was there, watching him as he went, giving him an elaborate-double take, just as he would if he were at one of his parties, where Bix tried always to make every guest feel as if he or she was the center of the universe.

“Good evening, Josephine,” he said, through the open window, putting on his smoothest host’s voice. “Might I offer you a lift?” 

Endeavour half-rolled his eyes, but he quirked a smile, too.

God, Bix could be awfully stupid, sometimes.

And Bixby made light of everything and made light.

And if you live in the shadows, long enough you forget the light.

Endeavour said nothing, only opened the door and got in.

“You’re drenched,” Bixby said, as if cringing for his upholstery. “Didn’t you take an umbrella?”

“No,” Endeavour said.

He turned to look out the window, but, despite the fact that he was still wearing sunglasses, Bix must have seen it, something in his face. Or perhaps there was something in the way he held himself, a tension in his shoulders or a clench in his jaw. Or perhaps there had been a trace of desperation in the manner in which he slammed the car door, as if anxious to put a wall between himself and the world.

Bixby frowned thoughtfully, his full mouth, always playing right on the edge of a smile, compressing.

“What the hell happened to you?”

“Nothing.”

“Something happened. Was it really that bad?”

“It’s nothing,” Endeavour said. “It was just a long day, that’s all. You know I hate those things.”

Bixby shrugged, looking unconvinced, but mercifully put the car into drive. And then they were off. And Endeavour said not one word.

After all, what could he tell him?

I saw a woman today, a woman I knew long ago, who I loved long ago, who I hoped to marry.

Who I left because I wasn’t any good for her.

Who I left because she deserved better.

But, evidently, I felt absolutely no compunction about inflicting myself on you.

Endeavour sighed. He tried to tell himself that Bix didn’t mind, that Bix knew what he was getting into, that Bix was a fraud, anyway, just like him, that he was as shallow as a mirror, as a forest pool, that Bix came and went as the wind blew.

But that wasn’t true, either.

You might be hard-pressed to find two people as different from one another as Monica and Bix, a soft-spoken and earnest nurse and a flashy and extroverted confidence man. But it would be difficult to find two people more alike, too. They each had the same gentleness in their brown eyes, a gentleness that was close to innocence. They always had to see the best in everything. In everyone.

Even in him.

Endeavour looked out into the rain, and just as all the separate drops formed one distinct and gentle roar, so did all the questions merge into one.

So why had he spared Monica and not Bix?

But it wasn’t the same. Bix didn’t know any better—he had never known Endeavour before . . . . . before . . .

He wasn’t lying to Bix. Not really. Bix only knew him for what he was, and he didn’t seem to mind.

He was able to fool Bix much more easily than he ever could have Monica.

But that sounded awful, too. 

Oh hell. He was hell. He was hell on earth.

At the stoplight, he pulled out the bottle and took a drink.

“What the . . . ?” Bix cried.

Endeavour startled. To top all, he was rude, too, drinking alone.

“Oh. Sorry. Do you want some?” Endeavour said.

“No, I don’t _want_ some. I’m driving. You’re the police officer. Haven’t you heard of the Highway Safety Act?” Bixby huffed a laugh. “One of us had to keep a driver’s license, wouldn’t you say, old man?”

Bix meant it as a joke, Endeavour knew, but, in the mood he was in, he couldn’t help but feel the reprimand beneath his words. It wasn’t fair. He _had_ gotten his license back, for a while, anyway. He’d driven Bix all over West Germany. How could he help but get mixed up when they were back in Oxford?

He knew just where to put the blame.

Turner.

It was Turner’s fault.

Just when Endeavour thought he was finally pulling his life together, Turner had to come along with this impossible book tour of Britain, taking him straight back to Oxford.

That’s what life was, wasn’t it? A push and a push and a push? As soon as Endeavour caught his breath, looked around, and said, “I can do this,” some other hurdle had to come along and twist him all about, making him to lose his way.

He took another drink, and Bix was watching him out of the corner of his eye. But it was all right.

The warmth coursed through him, putting the world at a safe distance. And in that golden haze, he took strength. Tomorrow he’d try harder. Reach further. He would not be that boat, beating against the current, bourne back ceaselessly into the past. But rather Bix's hydroplane, swift and streamlined, cutting through dark water, letting the ghosts dissolve into spray behind him, kicked up into a golden sun. 

As the fellow said. You only get one go around the board.

He’d make it up to Bix.

He'd make it up to him one way or another.

The storm beat on, drumming on the top of the car, as they turned away from Oxford, as they headed out through the fir trees around Lake Silence, heavy and green with rain.

It wasn’t so terrible, really.


	2. "When the Overture Begins, You Don't Know What the Opera is Going to Be."

Endeavour listened to the rhythm of the windscreen wipers and to the patter of the rain on the roof of the Jag, trying to put the tumult of the day behind him.

Over the past few weeks, he’d been in a different city every other day, each time facing a new and seemingly endless queue of people, until he felt he was going under, sinking beneath a deluge of confidences and questions and stories . . . . And then—without warning—a part of his own story, too, had been right there, as if falling down upon him from out of the skies, in the eyes of Monica.

And so, now, he listened to the rain as the thoughts spun and twisted and writhed in his head— much like those poems that he had once thrown away, the ones that he had tossed into the air, leaving them to circle and spin in the wind and to get caught high in the branches, here, in these very woods of Lake Silence.

“How would you like to get out of Oxford for a while?” Bixby asked.

“Mmmmmmm,” Endeavour replied.

He had had enough of Oxford this time round. It was one thing to come to Britain to consult on a case—to have something he could work at, to sink his thoughts into—but this book tour had afforded him, in his opinion, entirely too much time to think. 

He was more than ready to go home. To stretch out on the carpet and to listen to his records and to be left entirely alone.

He turned to look out the window, a slight crease forming on his brow. He wished now that he had not thought of it—of that long ago day when he had thrown a satchel-full of papers to the four winds.

Because from that day it was so easy to leap to the memory of another day, just a week or so after it, when he and Bix had driven to Heathrow Airport in London.

It had been a summer rain falling on that day, light and leaping, rather than an icy, drenching winter one, but Endeavour had listened to the windscreen wipers then, too, as they moved in a steady beat—listened to them until they began to sound as if they were whispering the words denoting the inscription that Nick Wilding had scratched onto a record. YEMKTTHL. One of the last messages, it transpired, that he would ever leave behind him. 

Swish-dop

Swish-dop

Yet Each

Man Kills

The Thing

He Loves.

Endeavour watched as the rain-soft trees of Lake Silence rolled past, letting the words pulse once more in his head with the rhythm of the wipers, until Bixby’s voice broke the lull of the watery chant.

“Open up the glove box,” he said.

“What?” Endeavour replied.

Not only did the words bring him out of his reverie, but the odd non-sequitur filled him with a sense of trepidation. It was something in Bix’s tone—that warm, rich, tone that he once adopted when welcoming guests to his parties, one that bespoke of wonder and magic and surprises around every corner—that Endeavour felt provided sound, empirical cause for alarm.

Because Endeavour had no wish for wonder or magic or surprises.

It was the familiar he longed for now, with all of his heart.

“Why?” Endeavour asked suspiciously.

Bix smiled, and—yes—there it was: his old, closed-lipped Bixby smile, half dazzle, half smirk.

“Just open it, old man. You’ll see.”

Endeavour took a deep breath. Slowly, as if he thought that unlatching the small door might trigger a bomb hidden in the glove box, Endeavour did as he was told.

Inside the compartment was a folder; the same folder that Endeavour had given Bix just a few months previously, the one that contained all the travel information—the tickets and itineraries—for a birthday trip Endeavour had planned for him, a beer tour, of sorts, of West Germany.

“Oh,” Endeavour said. “It’s a folder.”

And with any luck, that was all that it was.

Bixby rolled his eyes. 

“Yes, yes, it’s a folder. Open it. Look inside.”

Endeavour ran his fingertips over the rough edge to the corner, and then flipped it open, half-fearful that it might be . . . . 

And it was.

Before him lay a stack of papers, with a glossy brochure on top, depicting cream and mustard yellow and terra-cotta villas overlaid with sun-bright, white ornate trim, just like that of icing on teacakes, all stacked together along the very edge of water that shimmered in an impossible shade of aquamarine, dotted with tiny gondolas. 

Venice.

A city of marble and stone and blue canals the color of a dream.

A city of crowds and jostled elbows and mixed and mingled voices.

Endeavour could sense that Bixby was watching him, and so he struggled to keep his face carefully neutral as he thumbed further through the papers, taking in all the details that mapped out whatever circle of hell awaited him.

Behind the brochure, he found an envelope stamped with a golden phoenix, the logo of the Teatro La Fenice.

Opera tickets.

Oh, god, so this really was all for him, then. Bixby had planned the whole thing for him, as a gift. And there were the hotel reservations, too, for . . .

_“Three weeks?”_ Endeavour cried. 

But Bixby misunderstood. “That’s just in Venice. We can stay in Italy longer, of course. I thought we would swing by Florence, while we’re there, to that shop where I got your messenger bag. Get you a new one.”

At once, Endeavour put a protective hand to the strap of the satchel that lay snugly across his chest.

“But I like my old one,” he said.

Bixby wrinkled his nose in distaste. He had had a horror, Endeavour knew, of shoddy or cut-rate things, as if the ghost of his childhood poverty might leap out at him from a pair of over-worn shoes. He never seemed to understand how it gave him away as nouveau riche, that tendency. For all of his love of glitz and glamour, there were times that it seemed he had little appreciation for fine things, really fine things, the things that lasted.

Once something showed a bit of wear, out it went.

In a way, Bixby was utterly without mercy.

“It looks like it’s been through the wars, old man,” Bixby said. 

“It’s leather. It’s _designed_ to age,” Endeavour protested.

“Well, perhaps we might get the liner replaced, at least. Get rid of those jam stains. I’m sure they have a repair shop, we might drop it off at.” 

“Mmmmmm,” Endeavour said.

A repair shop.

Perhaps Bix might drop him off there, too, while he was at it.

Bixby frowned.

“Don’t you like it? I thought you’d be excited. I was told those operas were good ones. We’ll be there for the last week of _La Traviata,_ and for the first of _L’Orfeo_. The man I called for the tickets told me that beginning of _L’Orfeo_ is quite famous. That it was Monteverdi’s Toccata, that it’s some fabulously complicated little thing with all the instruments playing at once. Sounds quite showy.”

It was. Showy and multi-voiced—just the sort of piece that Bix would love to have playing as he made his grand entrance into a room. It was just the piece Bix himself would be, if he were a part of an opera. 

Endeavour couldn't help but smile at the thought. And that was good, too. It made it easier, much easier, to choke out the next few words. 

“Mmmmmm. Yes, it is. Thank you.”

“After all, we had a good time in Germany, didn’t we?” Bix prompted.

“Mmmmmm,” Endeavour said, suddenly glad that he had kept on his sunglasses, despite the rain. 

It had been fun on the main, the trip.

Except when it wasn’t.

Endeavour had always known that Bixby was the sort who thrived on the new, on adventure; he knew that it had been rather dull for Bix, sticking always so close to home. The trip to Germany Endeavour had meant as a birthday present, and as a surprise, and as sort of . . . well . . . as a sort of a thank-you gift, all in one.

He had tried his best to put his anxieties to rest, to let those old fears go, to make the trip enjoyable for Bix’s sake; he had tried to be all that Bix had wanted him to be, to fill the days with a sense of spontaneity and fun. 

And, much to Endeavour's surprise, in telling himself that he could do it, he found that he actually _could_ ; in pretending to have a good time, he found that he actually _did_. 

Mostly. 

But now, the weeks of traveling—both there and in Britain—had left him drained, right when Bix was ready to shoot off again, out into the stars.

Perhaps Endeavour had done a little _too_ good of a job of dissembling.

Hmmmmmmm.

Endeavour was a fraud, really, just like that painting. Just like the painting that sat under the light of an easel at the party where they met . . .

. . . and the swish and the wish and the wish of the wipers against the windscreen . . .

. . . and the real one hangs in the Rijksmuseum, I’ve seen it . . .

. . . and the swish and the wish . . .

_And it’s not just the painting that’s a fake, Pagan wished he could tell the man, the glittering host of the party._

_They are all of them frauds. They say what they don’t mean, and they don’t say what they wish with all of their hearts to say. They’re dangerous and the world is dangerous, and here you are smiling like it’s all a game._

_Like you really believe in your own good luck._

_Like you really believe in happiness._

_The thought of it left Pagan worn thin. He was tired—tired of everyone, tired of all of that terrible music, and, most of all, tired of worrying over the man. And so he left the party and went out onto the dock to stand under the stars._

_Sure enough, the man followed straightway, gliding thought the trees with his Scotch, looking just like he really was a prince, the ruler of a fairy-tale castle of his own devising._

_“Penny for them?” he asked._

_Pagan gave him a lopsided smile and turned away to look back up into the sky. It was a beautiful, clear night—the stars scattered with a sharp, pristine brilliance against the unreachable blackness, where, somewhere, the moons of Saturn revolved in their solitary orbits, each making its lonely way._

_The man took one step closer, and then another, his dark eyes taking him in, reflecting the light on the water and the lights in the sky, until it seemed as if his eyes were actually made of starlight._

_And he made light of everything and made light._

_He came nearer and nearer until he stood beside him. Then he cast a glance up into the sky as if to see what Pagan might be seeking there, and then he turned, so that he was looking him full in the face._

_“On a night like this, a man might believe that anything is possible," he murmured._

_Pagan stood for a moment, as if stunned._

_Dear God. If the man believed that, then he was beyond Pagan’s help._

_But, somehow, those words, coming from this man, rang true. And the words sounded like bells._

_And they caught Pagan by such surprise that he laughed: and that surprised him, too._

. . . And the stars on the dock, and the stars over the Rhine, and I wish I may, I wish . . .

. . . And the swish and the wish . . . 

. . . And the wish of the wipers on the windscreen and the patter of the rain . . .

Endeavour scowled and looked back out the window, scrubbing up the waves at his nape. Bixby was woefully transparent, had been, from the moment they met. One look into his eyes, and Endeavour could read him as easily as a book, knew exactly what he was thinking. It was hardly surprising; the man was direct as a freight train, as shallow as a forest pool. 

But what was surprising was this: when Bixby looked at him that night, it seemed as if he saw through his mask, too.

As if he understood him just as easily. 

And Bixby _had_ understood him, understood him in a way that no one else could—it was as if Bix had decided long ago not to press him overmuch, to allow him to do things on his own time. 

“You like it, don’t you?” Bixby asked. “It will be fun. Eat drink and be merry. Isn’t that right, old man?”

Endeavour struggled to think of something to say, something that would not disappoint Bix, but yet wouldn’t be a lie.

“Mmmmmm,” he hummed, noncommittally. 

But perhaps Bixby was right. It wouldn’t be _so_ very terrible, really. Not if he was with Bix. The Teatro de Fenice, after all, was something not to be missed. They would go about under the stars, walk through the squares, have a beer or two in a courtyard stung with lights. The crowds might serve as a shield, really. No one would notice him. He would be just one more English tourist. 

“You're warming up to it,” Bix said, with a trace of laugh under his voice, as if he was daring Endeavour to contradict him. “I can tell.” 

“Mmmmmm,” Endeavour hummed again, this time with an upward rise, edging toward agreement. 

“Knew that you would, old man. Once you thought about it.”

“I suppose,” Endeavour said. “I suppose it would be alright.”

“So it’s settled? New Year’s Eve in Venice? We’re off, then?”

Endeavour took a steadying breath.

It would be all right.

Who knew?

It might even be fun.

And then, much to his surprise, he found himself quirking the hint of a smile.

“Lord willing and the creek don't rise,” Endeavour said, solemnly. 

Bixby laughed—whether at his choice of reply or at the incongruity of hearing such a thing in his rounded, slightly northern English accent, Endeavour wasn't sure.

“Of course it won't,” Bixby replied. “It will all be smooth sailing. You can see for yourself, I have it all planned out. You know I take care of the details.” He looked at him knowingly. “We'll follow a carefully planned itinerary.” 

Endeavour quirked another smile. It was true: no one understood him quite like Bix.

“There’s not one thing that can go all mammocked and cattywampus on us,” Bix said. “Not one thing, old man.”

And Endeavour's eyes went wide.

What sort of godawful, anachronistic abomination was that? 

He turned to Bix, his face furrowed in confusion, but Bix threw the car into a higher gear and pumped the gas, laughing. 

Endeavour shook his head, wondering how it could be so—how it could be that no one understood him quite like Bixby.

Whereas, sometimes, it seemed, they didn’t even speak the same language.


	3. "If it will be a tragedy, or comedy..."

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Oh, and I should note: this universe is slightly ahead of cannon timeline-wise, because I wanted part 2 to line up with the 1969 theft of Caravaggio's Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence. So this takes place during New Year's Eve of 1971.

Opera, Bixby had long since decided, was a bit of an acquired taste—just as drinking tea hot and with milk was, rather than drinking it the way God intended: steeped in a glass pitcher set in the sun, mixed with two cups of sugar, and poured over ice.

Endeavour would most likely not appreciate his saying so, but over the years, Bix had come to believe that opera was not so very different, after all, from the parties that he had once thrown out at the house on Lake Silence; both were elaborate spectacles in which everyone wore a disguise and in which everyone played his part.

Much like one of Endeavour’s operas, Bixby’s parties had been brimful of plot lines and plot twists: there had been discoveries of new love out on the cool blue lawns, forbidden kisses amidst softly glowing Japanese lanterns, duels of honor at the roulette wheel, and revelations whispered over flutes of champagne. Each of his parties had been a hundred operas, all performed within the span of a single night.

And the backdrop, the scenery, of course, had been played a key role in the drama. But his stone palace of a house—no matter how spectacularly tricked out with fairy lights or tastefully-lit counterfeit masterpieces—could not hold a candle to the glow of the Teatro La Fenice. Sitting in one of its filigreed box seats was like sitting within a circle of pure golden light, one of many consecutive rings of gold that cascaded down and down, pooling in metallic brilliance around the grand stage below.

Such a setting usually showed Endeavour off to his best advantage; dressed in a well-cut evening suit, his expression set with that odd sort of intensity that it took on whenever he sat at a performance, as if every atom of his being was vibrating in tune to the register of the orchestra pit, he was virtually irresistible.

But tonight, he sat slouched in his seat, his austere features contorted into a definite scowl.

“Everything all right, old man?” Bixby asked.

Endeavour said nothing, only continued to look straight ahead.

“Endeavour?”

Finally, Endeavour turned to him.

“When were you ever in the Outer Banks of North Carolina?” he asked.

Bixby blinked, confused not only by the non-sequitur, but by the stunning and absolute precision of it.

Because he _had_ been there, but only for the span of three months—and years before he’d even dreamed of leaving for Britain. How could Endeavour possibly have known anything about it?

“What’s that, old man?” 

Endeavour leaned over and began to dig through the satchel that lay at his feet.

Bixby grimaced. It was annoying sometimes, his need to drag the thing about with him everywhere. The leather was designed to wear and soften with age, but Endeavour had put the thing through paces against all reason. It was hardly the accessory Bixby would have chosen for a night at Venice’s Teatro La Fenice.

This was a nice place, after all.

Bixby was just beginning to wonder if Endeavour would ever find whatever it was he was looking for amidst the jumble in his bag, when, finally, he pulled a heavy book from out of its depths and then dumped it unceremoniously into Bixby’s lap.

It looked, from the plainness of the cover, to be some sort of academic tome.

 _“A Linguistic Atlas of the United States_ ,” Bixby read aloud, musingly.

He flipped the book open; it had been written by a Harold Orton, a don, Bixby gathered from the imprint, from the University of Leeds. It looked to be one of those terribly dull affairs, with print as small as a march of ants across the page.

“Ah,” Bixby said. “What’s this, then? A little light entertainment before the opera begins?”

But Endeavour looked decidedly unamused.

“Mammocked,” Endeavour said. “That’s rather an odd word, isn’t it? I know of no instances of its use since Shakespeare’s _Coriolanus_. So. I looked into it.”

Of course he did.

“ . . . And I found that the word is still used today in the Outer Banks of North Carolina,” Endeavour finished crisply.

Bixby shrugged. “I helped out on a fishing boat there one fall, working my way up to New York.”

“I never knew that,” Endeavour said.

“Wasn’t all that interesting, really,” Bixby said. Then he laughed. “Not as if I ever learned what it was exactly you did all those years in the Army, is it, old man?”

But Endeavour was obviously unplacated, his blue eyes smoldering so that they took on the sharpness of blue ice.

“This has nothing to do with the Outer Banks, does it?” Bixby ventured.

“No. It doesn’t.”

“Well what, then?”

He whipped around to face him.

“You never told me that cracker is a pejorative,” Endeavour said.

_“What?_ ” Bixby asked, feeling already as if he had he once again lost his bearings.

“ _What cracker is this same that deafs our ears with this abundance of superfluous breath,_ ” Endeavour quoted. “From Shakespeare’s _King John._ I thought perhaps that you meant it in terms of a Christmas cracker, as in someone who was full of surprises. But you didn’t mean that at all, did you? You meant it in its usage as a sixteenth-century pejorative. I should have realized that at once, from the context.”

Bixby was about to quip that Endeavour should be amazed at how he seemed to be peppering his speech with an awful lot of Shakespearean words for someone who never bothered to read the stuff, but Endeavour seemed to be in no mood for a joke.

He snatched up the book then and shoved it back into his bag.

“And yet you’ve been allowing me to go about saying it,” he said. “I suppose you’ve been having a good laugh at my expense.”

A crease formed on Bixby’s brow. _“What?_ ” he asked, incredulously. “Of course, not.” 

“I’m certainly not here to be your useful fool, your court jester,” he said quietly, his face tight with disapproval.

“I never said that you were.”

“Then why? Why didn’t you tell me?”

Bixby exhaled sharply through his nose. “I don’t know, old man,” he said. “I . . . . I liked the way you said it, I suppose. You sort of had a way of turning the word into something else, that seemed to . . . I don’t know. . . to negate it somehow. And . . . I don’t know. I suppose I simply didn’t want to tell you.”

“Why?” Endeavour asked at once.

  
_Why?_ What sort of question was that? What was the point of creating Joss Bixby if not to put his past behind him? To put a world between him and his fifteen-year-old self, a boy who had stood on the bank of the creek watching the men from Atlanta collecting water samples in small glass vials and muttering about him in the third person?

“Well,” Bixby murmured. “Look around you, old man. They were right about me, weren’t they? Bruce, Tony, all the others? You know and I know that this is hardly a world in which I belong. I just didn’t want you to think of me that way, I suppose.” 

He quirked a hint of a smile.

“I suppose I just preferred for you to think of me as someone who is full of surprises.”

Endeavour regarded him for a long moment, but said nothing. Then he turned away.

A brisk roll of a drum quickly followed by a shining blare of bright trombones resounded throughout the hall, striking up the first notes of Monteverdi’s Toccata. Just as the violins joined in, adding their own unique flourish, the lights in the opera house went down, plunging the audience into darkness, and Endeavour’s hand fell warmly on top of his own.

Bixby shifted his own hand in response, and Endeavour clasped it, bringing their joined hands to rest on his seat beside him. Bixby chanced a glance at him, but Endeavour was already looking down at the stage below, already losing himself to it all. But that was all right. From the way in which Endeavour held his hand in his, he was given to understand that all was forgiven. That all was once again right in their world.

Bix leaned back in his seat again, waiting for the spectacle to begin. It was a perfect moment. They were within and without: both a part of the excitement and anticipation in the air, and safely buffered from it, sitting hand in hand, looking down on the scene from on high, like two stars in in their own, separate sphere, utterly inviolate.

The story began, and it was all right, really. It seemed a light little thing: a boy and girl in love at a country revelry, complete with dancing and tossed flowers and lilting Renaissance pipes. The music seemed to play and turn and weave in a far different manner than that of those ponderous German productions that Endeavour so favored, the ones which left Bixby to feel as if he needed a guide to follow who was related to whom.

_“But I thought Siegmund and Sieglinde were both the children of Wotan?”_

_“They are.”_

_“But doesn’t that make them a brother and sister?”_

_“Yes.”_

_“Hmmm. Eh. Alright, then, old man.”_

Even as the music of the pipes and violins capered along, as light and as sun-dappled as a clear stream, Endeavour’s hand remained warm and firm in his. Even when the opera turned to tragedy, Bix’s spirits remained untouched by it; it was inevitable from the first, the old story right there, in the title, after all.

And, at any rate, it was all so theatrically done—amongst mournful quadrilles and bittersweet arias— that Eurydice's inevitable death by snakebite and descent into Hades carried all the weight of a passing dream. It was nothing that could touch him, here, in his private box, with Endeavour, who was and who always would be that steadying presence that anchored him to earth, the real and warm weight beside him.

The one who knew the truth behind the mask, but who had held on just as tightly still.

Some hint of the happiness that dwelt there in his heart must have shown in his face, increasing his natural magnetism and setting it into overdrive, because somewhere towards the end of the performance, he began to have that odd sensation that swooped over him sometimes at a party, that feeling that he was being watched with covetous eyes from across a crowded room.

He glanced away from the stage, down into the audience, and saw that a woman with dark liquid eyes and heavy mounds of dark hair pinned with a pearl comb had turned around in her seat three tiers below, and was looking up at him with a smoldering intensity that made her intentions all too clear.

Ah.

Well.

That was hardly surprising.

It was an occupational hazard you lived with every day, when you had Bixby’s suave good looks and unquenchable charisma.

In the past, it hadn’t been a problem. There had always been plenty of him to go around.

But now that he was settled, he found that he simply couldn’t help it. He couldn’t help, wherever he went, but to leave a trail of broken hearts in his wake.

Poor girl.

She turned her attention back to the opera, and Bixby rather hoped that that would be that, but, then, a few minutes later, she turned again, gazing up at him with the ferocity of a tigress.

He smiled apologetically—and he hoped, not unkindly—so as to let her know she was wasting her time, so as to let her down easy.

And then she scowled at him.

For a moment Bix was taken aback, confused.

And then, slowly, he came to the realization that her gaze had been directed seven inches to his right.

Bixby dropped back in his seat and put his fist to his mouth as if to suppress a cough in order to stifle his laughter.

Well. Well.

It looked as if Endeavour had made quite the conquest.

Bixby could almost feel it—not just in the growing firmness with which Endeavour held onto his hand, but he could sense it, too, the tension that was gathering in Endeavour’s shoulders, as he, too, became increasingly aware of the dark-eyed woman’s long, pointed looks and rapt expression. 

Once Endeavour reached the point where he was beginning to look almost alarmed, Bix leaned over and murmured, “Looks like you’ve caught someone’s eye, old man.”

Endeavour snorted. “Hardly,” he said.

But then, Endeavour didn’t have half the confidence he should. Most likely, he was probably fearful that she was planning to track him down after the performance, to ask him to autograph a book for her sister-in-law.

He could almost hear Endeavour’s low and mournful voice in his head.

“Hopefully, she won’t want to _talk,”_ he would say, with that the baleful emphasis on the last word, as if such a thing might be a fate much worse than death.

Endeavour straightened in his seat, then, watching the players on the stage with fresh resolve, as if determined that he would not let the woman’s stolen glances ruin his enjoyment of the grand finale. 

And it wasn’t an ending to be missed. Apollo himself sauntered onto the stage, dressed in a suit of gold armor emblazoned with a stylized sun, holding a golden helmet under his arm. He reached out a hand to Orpheus in invitation, beckoning him to return with him to the heavens, to where his beloved Eurydice lived on in the stars.

Slowly, the stage lighting seemed to shift, so that it resembled the glow of a setting sun, to reveal a black backdrop glittering with silver constellations, and the two, singing as they turned from the audience, disappeared into the fading darkness until their voices were all that remained.

And then, just like that, on their final drawn-out note, the lights brightened, and groups of nymphs and shepherds dressed in white, wearing flowers and laurels in their hair, came up onto to the stage from both directions. They spun and turned small squares, their hands just brushing one another as they passed, taking leaping, small steps to the tune of a piping flute; it was just the sort of dance you might expect to have seen in the court of Queen Elizabeth I.

And that was that.

No jilted fiancé singing a five-minute aria while staggering about with a dagger plunged into his chest.

No woman dying in the arms of her lover, while a powerless duke looked on.

Only two long-lost lovers reunited in the heavens, together in the stars for all eternity.

“Ah,” Bixby said in satisfaction, as the house lights flooded the place, ending the illusion with a wave of the magician’s hand. “And so the good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. I suppose that’s what fiction means.”

Endeavour looked at him as if he were utterly daft.

“What do you mean, ended happily? They’re dead.”

Bixby quirked a rueful smile.

For someone so clever, Endeavour certainly had a tendency to see things in black or white, to take them rather too literally.

But then, Bix never would be able understand how the man could spend the better part of two hours hanging on to every note of a magic he did not believe in.

*****

They filed out amidst the crowds, making their way through a jostle of bodies and a rumble of conversation, and came out as last into the main hall. Just as Bix had suspected, the woman with the liquid eyes had managed to time it so that she stepped out from her row just as they happened to pass.

“Excuse me,” she said, immediately in English, leaving little doubt that she knew just who Endeavour was. “You’re . . . You’re Endeavour Morse, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” Endeavour said.

“Ah. Forgive me,” she said, in a rush of words that sounded like a sigh. “It must be tiresome to be stopped so often. I’m sure you simply wanted to enjoy the performance, and I must have . . .”

“No, not at all,” Endeavour said.

Bixby could barely repress a snort.

“I simply wanted to commiserate. I was just reading about your book tour,” she said. “It sounded terribly grueling.”

“Mmmmmm,” Endeavour said. 

“Awfully short-sighted, it always seems to me, publishing houses sending their writers out to do their marketing work for them,” she said. “You might have been at home, working on your next book.”

"Mmmmmm,” Endeavour said.

“I would go so far as to say that Turner simply doesn’t appreciate you. Not in the way that he should. No?”

And Endeavour frowned, perplexed.

Bixby was surprised, too; it wasn’t every fan who bothered to know the name of his editor.

She opened a tiny, black beaded bag and pulled out a business card. 

“Violetta Talenti,” she said, pronouncing her name as if it had ten syllables rather than seven, in a manner that Bixby found vaguely annoying. “Talenti and Talenti Publishing. You really ought to consider signing with us. I think you would find working with our house an entirely different experience.”

“Sorry,” Endeavour said. “I’m afraid I’m already under contract.”

But the woman laughed, a tinkle of a laugh like rippling water. “There are ways out of that. We can simply buy Von Haussen Dubret out. I can talk to Turner for you, even, if you’d like. Save you the unpleasantness.” She shrugged. “Every man has his price. _Non é che cosí?_ ” 

She offered him the card, then, thrusting it toward Endeavour so that he had no choice, really, but to take it.

“All I ask is that you give the matter some thought. One thing is for certain. We certainly wouldn’t have you wasting your time and ours traipsing around Britain living out of squalid hotel rooms, doing the work of an entire _marketing department.”_

Endeavour grew still at that.

“And those promotional posters. It’s hardly any wonder that you can’t go about in peace, what with your publishers using your, well . . .” and, here, she smiled demurely, “your good looks and sex appeal in order to sell a few extra copies.”

Bixby couldn’t help but quirk a smile at that. It was a pleasure, actually, to see a master at work. She was hitting every key, making certain that she’d tap at least one that would strike a chord.

“Just give it some thought, is all I ask. For your own sake.”

She offered her hand then, and Endeavour gave it a tentative shake.

“All right,” he said, slowly.

She flashed a final crimson lipstick smile and then turned crisply on her improbable heel and set off, disappearing into the crowds in a cloud of perfume and hairspray.

Bixby was certain that Endeavour would toss the card away in the first rubbish bin they passed, but, instead, he seemed to turn it over in his long fingers, thoughtfully.

“What do you think?” he asked.

Bixby huffed a laugh. “Sounds awfully neat for a publishing firm, doesn’t it? Talenti and Talenti? It’s as if the very name is meant to flatter.”

“So. You think it’s all empty words.”

“Well, old man. Let’s just say I’ve run enough hustles in my life to know one when I see one.”

“So. I shouldn’t meet with them.”

Bixby grimaced. He had learned long ago that offering too direct of an opinion on matters such as this was apt to leave him skating on thin ice.

“Let’s go have a drink,” Bixby said. “What do you say, hmmm?”

****

The waiter held up a bottle, showing Bix the label, and Bixby nodded in approval.

Endeavour sat just on the other side of the table, angled toward him, watching the scene around him with bright interest. He looked damned good, actually.

Bix didn’t entirely approve of the seventies, but Endeavour seemed to have embraced them wholeheartedly, allowing his hair to go longer and wavier and growing out his sideburns. He was just as likely these days to go about in one of those ridiculous T-shirts Esme seemed so keen on sending him, then he was to wear one of the jumper and matching tie sets he had so favored when they had first met.

It was an inescapable truth: the seventies represented a tasteless lowering of standards, all around.

But here, freshly shaven and in a well-tailored suit, his big eyes glowing softly in the candlelight, Endeavour looked so formal and buttoned-up that he seemed somehow unattainable, a feeling that gave Bix a warm glow.

When Bixby saw something that he wanted that was also unattainable . . . well, it was simple, wasn’t it?

His goal was always to attain it.

“So,” Bixby said. “You wanted to talk. Does that mean that this is the night that at last I discover what it was you did in the Army?”

“You know, already,” Endeavour said, glumly. “Signals.”

Bixby half-rolled his eyes. “But what does that _mean_ , exactly? Were you listening in to Russian operatives? Dropping off documents in St. James Park?”

“Nothing so romantic, I’m afraid,” Endeavour said. “Besides. I don’t want to talk about the Army. I want to know what you were doing on a fishing boat of all things.”

Bixby smiled and took a sip of wine, preparing to pull off the performance of a lifetime. If Endeavour loved the opera, then opera he would have.

And so Bix spun tale after tale as the number of empty bottles on their table multiplied—he told Endeavour of the day they had taken a boat out to sea to weather the winds of a hurricane, of days of gentle surf, when dolphins followed the boat, eager for leavings, of stories he had heard from the old crew chief, stories of pirates who distilled whiskey strong enough to kill the devil, hid in secret stashes in a place that had come to be known as Kill Devil Hills, stories of carvings on old trees that might offer clues as to the fate of The Lost Colony.

Not long after Endeavour switched over from wine to Scotch, his eyes passed the point of bleariness and began to crackle with a new and luminous intensity, as if he hung on his every word.

It was amazing what a little smoke and mirrors could do to the most tedious and grueling of summers.

But then, just because something wasn’t real, didn’t mean it could be beautiful.

As midnight approached, the conversation in the restaurant rose to the level of a dull roar, as men in evening suits and women in jewel-toned gowns crowded around small tables closer to the window, preparing for the grand countdown and to see the fireworks bursting out over St. Mark’s Square.

Endeavour reached across the table and took his hand as he half-rose from his chair, as if to propel him to his feet, as if to urge him along with him, and Bixby moved it decorously away and called for the cheque.

Bix smiled. Endeavour was right, after all. They could hardly exchange a New Year’s kiss here amongst the throngs of revelers.

****

It took Bixby a moment of fumbling as he unlocked the hotel room door, but as soon as he did so, warm hands took him by the shoulders and spun him around, pushing him up against it. In the next moment, Endeavour was there, following after him, pressing his angular body flush against his and putting both of his hands to his face to solder their mouths together in a kiss.

Bixby found himself half-laughing under the insistent press and brush of Endeavour’s mouth on his. It always caught him off-guard, Endeavour’s sudden bursts of daring. He wasn’t the most confident of lovers, so when he did make such a move—whether it was to thread his fingers through his to pull him down onto the carpet with him as he listened to his records, or to suddenly appear in the doorway of his study in that kilt and fly plaid—it nearly knocked Bixby breathless.

Bixby pulled away and asked, “Are you sure you don’t have any more questions? About menhaden, for example?”

“No,” Endeavour said.

And then Endeavour's mouth was once again on his, with careless kisses that tasted like Scotch, brushing his face and throat as Endeavour pressed himself still further, so that he could feel the warmth of him even through their evening suits, slotting them together in such a way that shot fireworks through his veins, pulses bright enough that Bix was altogether oblivious to the real ones bursting out over the Venetian skyline framed in the windows outside.

_*****_

Endeavour opened his eyes and stretched, confused for the briefest of instants by the salmon pink walls, the disorienting brightness of the day.

Ah.

Venice.

He turned over to find an empty place beside him and a note by the clock on the bedside table.

Endeavour furrowed his brow and scrubbed up his hair. It was already half one. He reached out to take the note, already certain as to what it would say. He knew that there would be no possible way in which Bixby would leave Italy without a new suit or a pair of shoes.

Endeavour snorted as he read. You would think that most of the shops would be closed for New Year’s Day, but, with all the tourists in town for New Year’s Eve celebrations, he supposed the shopkeepers were keen to make the most of it. As, no doubt, was Bix.

He was struck by a sudden thought then, and quickly he rolled over to make certain that his bag was just where he had left it, that Bixby had not taken it upon himself to take it into the shop for repair.

It was fine, the satchel. Endeavour liked it just as it was. An awful waste of money it would be, replacing the lining, as Bix kept suggesting.

But the bag was there, just where he had dropped it the night before, by his nightstand.

Endeavour sagged against the pillows, exhaling audibly in relief.

Then, slowly, he got up to shower and to dress and to meet the new year.

_****_

Endeavour made his way into the hotel restaurant with only one thing on his splitting mind.

Coffee.

As soon as he came out into an elegant, sun-lit bay of round tables decked with snow-white tablecloths and sprays of red flowers, a purring sort of voice called out to him. 

“Ah, Mr. Morse.”

He paused, mid-step. At a table on a white wrought-iron balcony overlooking the canal, was Violetta Talenti, the woman he had met at the opera just the night before. She was wearing a bright red dress with a complicated neckline, but even the blood brightness of her dress could not compete with the intensity of her eyes, two dark pools that seemed to engulf him whole, so that he felt almost compelled to move in her direction.

“Hello,” he said.

“Mr. Morse. Imagine meeting you here,” she said, even though Endeavour somehow had the definite impression that she knew all too well that he was here, that she had been waiting for him. What were the chances that they would happen to find themselves in the same hotel, after all?

“Won’t you sit down?” she asked.

Endeavour hesitated, but there was something in those eyes that made him feel as if he could not help but obey.

“All right,” he said. “Thank you, Signora Talenti.”

She reached out and squeezed his hand lightly as he sat down.

“Call me Violetta. Please.”

“All right,” Endeavour said.

A waiter came over then, with coffee and a menu, sparing him from the awkwardness of answering in kind.

After all, if he was to call her Violetta, shouldn’t he return the gesture, tell her that she might call him Endeavour?

He supposed that he should, but he wasn’t quite sure whether he wanted to, not just yet. He had the inexplicable feeling that he was being pushed, rushed into something, but why he should feel that way, he simply couldn’t say.

He took up his cup and took a sip, gratefully; his head was still splitting from last night’s Scotch. He rubbed his forehead, barely beginning to collect his thoughts, to get his bearings, when a man appeared at his side with a basket of cheap fabric roses.

_“Fiore per la signora_?” he asked.

Endeavour furrowed his brow for a moment, confused.

Ah.

He must have somehow thought . . .

Well, he obviously had the wrong idea.

“Oh,” Endeavour said. “No. Grazie.”

“Si! Avaro!” Signora Talenti said, and then with deft hands, she undid her bag, pulling out a single folded note.

“Come se dice _cheap_?” she asked, narrowing her eyes wryly at the flower seller.

Endeavour huffed an uneasy laugh.

“Discerning,” he corrected.

Then he swallowed and took another sip of coffee.

Had he been rude, somehow? It wasn’t as if they knew one another, particularly. Or had he embarrassed her in front of the flower seller, who would not have known, from their intimate setting on New Year’s Day, that they were perfect strangers to one another? Would it have been the polite thing, the chivalrous thing, simply to have bought his gewgaw?

Bixby, he supposed, might have said so. He was forever working the room at parties and galas and “board meetings” held at five-star restaurants. He might have made a game of it, bought a rose and made rather a grand show of its presentation. He might even have bought the whole basket and set it before her. “A world of flowers, and still not one a match for your beauty,” he might have said, or some other god-awful thing trite enough to make a sensible person wince.

“It seems a waste to spend money on this artificial rubbish,” Endeavour said, mulishly, feeling wrong-footed already. He cast a wistful glance around the quiet restaurant, looking at the sea of empty tables. He was beginning to wish he had simply nodded to Signora Talenti and gone off to sit by himself.

She, in the meantime, was looking at him as if she could not take her eyes off of him.

“It will never fade,” she countered. “Never die.”

“Yeah,” Endeavour said. “But it’s not real.”

“Michelangelo’s David isn’t David,” she replied. “ _Ceni n’est pas une pipe_."

Endeavour scowled. There were few things he hated more than that folderol, the treachery of images, _this is not a pipe_ , and all the rest. It brought to mind that awful day when he had first seen that biography of him written by Jerome Hogg, of how odd it was to see that old photograph of himself with the words _Endeavour Morse_ running underneath it, as if the two things should match up somehow.

The photograph, taken in his university days, seemed to Endeavour to be that of a perfect stranger, a version of himself he had quite forgotten. Looking at that cover had been like looking at a slightly disturbing illustration of the theories of De Saussure—one with a picture of a hat, for example, with the word _egg_ written beneath it.

Just then, as if Violetta knew somehow just what he was thinking, she set a book on the table, face down. It wasn’t Hogg’s book, but rather his own, his first one, already looking dated with its black and white photo on the back cover.

It left him with a swooping sensation, somewhere in his gut, to see it. It was odd to consider how many things that the Endeavour Morse in the photograph did not know.

Bixby’s real name, for one.

But mostly, it brought to mind just what an idiot he had felt when he had posed for the thing.

He had complained about it bitterly to Bix at the time, but he wasn't particularly sympathetic. He had only laughed and said, “Young girls like poetry books.”

“So,” Violetta said. “Care to talk about this?”

Endeavour grimaced.

“Why?” Endeavour asked.

Violetta Talenti shrugged. “You look a bit miserable, that’s all.”

And she was right; he had been.

And he was made even more miserable by the fallout of it all.

Because of that photograph, he came to feel as if people were watching him wherever he went, just as someone was always watching him in . . .

Endeavour looked down, let out a long and steady breath, scrubbed up the hair at his nape, and then took another sip of coffee.

He couldn't help but remember, then, a night long ago, when he had been listening to records back at the house in Lorraine. 

_“I wish to God you’d call Turner back. He’s called me eight times if he’s called once,” Bixby said._

_Endeavour lay on the carpet, his right foot resting at an angle across his bent left leg._

_“I don’t know why they are harassing me about that,” he said. “I already told them no. No and no and no and no,” he added, kicking his foot on each “no.”_

_“About what? It sounds like all they want is a photo for the back cover.”_

_“I’m not doing that.”_

_“But why?” Bixby asked. “I quite thought you’d become poetry’s pinup boy, with that. When we were at Oxford and Cambridge, I thought I was going to have to beat off all those eager little undergrads off with a stick.”_

_Endeavour’s face clouded at that. “That photograph ruined my life,” he said._

Violetta reached forward and took his hand in hers as it lay resting on the table, rubbing one soft thumb back and forth along the inside of his curled palm, tracing the curve of his hand.

It was mesmerizing somehow, the movement of her small thumb, tipped with a perfectly rounded blood-red nail, and Endeavour felt he couldn’t help but watch it, that bob of red amidst the yin and yang of their hands as they lay curved together, hers soft and olive, his broader and paler and spattered with freckles.

“You couldn’t even enjoy the opera, could you?” she murmured. “Having to wonder, always wonder, who might recognize you?”

“Mmmmm,” Endeavour said.

“Well,” she said. “You can say _arrivederci_ to all of that nonsense, once you sign with us.”

And Endeavour went still. 

“For us, it’s about the words, not the looks of the man who writes them. This is the era of women’s liberation, yes? And, what is it you say . . . ? What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. No?”

“I suppose,” Endeavour said.

“So why should your image be used as a marketing gimmick? Without such materials, in a few years, the memory of them might fade, even as you yourself change. You could completely disappear. Be utterly anonymous again. You’d be free.”

And Endeavour thought of that terrible day in the Forest of Darney, when it seemed as if the very trees had been watching him, thought of all the time he had spent looking in the mirror at the one strand of silver amidst the auburn, wondering if he might get his wish, after all, to go prematurely gray, so that soon he'd look nothing like any of those scattered images of himself. 

He thought darkly of that night in the pub back in Oxford, when Fancy and Trewlove had given Bixby that promotional poster as if it had been some sort of inside joke, while all the while he had sat there confused, the color rising hotly in his face.

What? Did they think that all just went completely over his head?

It certainly wasn’t _his_ fault if Turner had forced him to pose like a prat against that PELICON signal. It wasn’t even as if he was trying to be particularly alluring. As he recalled, he had been looking daggers at the cameraman, angry about wasting his time on such idiocy, and boiling over the tremendous row he had had with Thursday over his new best friend, DCI Ronnie Can’t-Think-Outside-The Box.

Violetta Talenti was smiling at him knowingly. It was as if she could read his mind. As if she understood what a relief it would be never to have to go on another book tour. Never to have to face a long queue of strangers that seemed to go on and on. Never to have to pose like a tart for one of Turner’s promotional pieces, so that he felt that eyes were following him wherever he went. In a few years, he might be unrecognizable. In a few years, he might pass through a crowd unseen.

He might disappear, just as she said.

He'd be free, free of all of it. 

“Of course, we do have a few terms,” Violetta demurred, leading Endeavour to think that perhaps she had seen it, the eagerness in his face. “You’ll have to meet with our creative director, my husband, Ludo, for one.”

“Creative director?” Endeavour asked uncertainly.

“A formality, in your case, I assure you. He can meet with you whenever you happen to be in Oxford. Or he could come to Nancy. Whenever it suits you, of course.”

“Oxford?” Endeavour asked.

“Oh. Didn't you know? Our head office is there,” she explained. “Rather simplifies matters for you, does it not? Ludo can even drive out to your house, spare you the trouble. No more long drives to Paris. Rather convenient for you, yes?”

And she had no idea how convenient that would be, considering he had once again had his driver’s license revoked. It was for a year this time, as it had been his second revocation. 

If they would come out to him . . . well . . . perhaps no one need ever know.

He could have it all, the best of both worlds: the career that kept him from that terrible feeling he had had when he had first gone to France, that awareness that he was living entirely off of Bixby’s largesse, with none of the strings attached. He wouldn’t have to go anywhere he didn’t want to, and he’d be able to go anywhere he did.

“But . . . ,” Endeavour said, feeling as if he was falling back down to earth, . . No, like Orpheus, descending into Hades. “As tempting as that sounds, as I said. I’m already under contract.”

“And as _I_ said, Mr. Morse,” she replied. “We can deal with Turner. Every man has his price. We’ll buy your publisher out. Simple as that.”

But that was perhaps...

“No,” Endeavour said. “No. I'll talk to him.” 

“As you wish,” she said. 

She pulled out a sheaf of papers and set them before him, placing a single black pen smartly on top.

“One signature. The choice is yours.”

“I don’t know,” Endeavour murmured.

Because then, unbidden, there was another memory, of a day when he had stood in a red call box at the side of a deserted road.

_“Endeavour?” Turner had asked. “Where the hell are you?”_

_“I’m in a call box,” Endeavour replied._

_“Where? I’ll drive out and pick you up,” Turner said._

_“No,” Endeavour said. “You can’t. I’m not in France. I . . I think I’m in Scotland.”_

And Turner had come out to his aid, hadn’t he? He hadn’t asked too many questions…

Although he had forced him to sit for another series of photographs to promote a book that, at that point, was bound to be a few weeks late. And, since that was his fault, since he had thrown those poems away, tossed them into the woods around Lake Silence, buzzing, no doubt, with whatever the hell had been in Nick Wilding’s wine, Endeavour had felt as if he had no choice but to be utterly tractable, putty in Turner’s hands—no choice but to endure it all.

“ _Can’t you straighten yourself out, for god’s sake?” Turner had said, as he stood slouched and worn and tired before the camera._

And yes. He could.

He would bloody well show him how well that he could.

He took up the pen and clicked it, placed it on the edge of the line and signed.

_Endeavour . . ._

“What’s this? Endeavour?” Bixby asked.

Endeavour looked up. Bixby was there, standing over him. 

“What are you doing?” Bix asked.

“Signing a new contract,” Endeavour replied.

Bix’s face fell into lines of concern, making him to look uncharacteristically solemn; it made him look a bit of a stranger, really. It was an expression he wore for his business associates, never for him.

“You’re going to dump old Turner? Just like that?” he asked. “It was he who gave you your first contract based solely on that notebook I sent in.”

“Loyalty is an admirable quality,” Violetta said, her eyes locked on Bixby's. “But sometimes we outgrow . . . our original attachments.”

An odd expression flickered for the briefest of moments across Bix’s set features, as if he had been struck, and then his manner changed, grew even crisper, harder. 

“So,” he asked, “What percentage are they taking?”

It was unsettling. Bix had formed the question to him, but all the while his eyes were on at Violetta, as if he were asking her. 

And perhaps he wasn’t wrong, because . . . .

“You don't know?” Bixby asked. “My God. You’re signing a contract with these people and you don't even know the basic terms of the offer?”

Bix snatched the papers up from the table before Endeavour could protest. Of course, he was working his way round to that. He just . . just . . .

Just hadn’t thought to ask about that yet.

Despite the sharpness of Bixby’s words, Violetta’s smile grew wider. “Oh. But, of course," she said. "I should have known. You are Mr. Bixby, I believe, yes?”

Endeavour frowned. It seemed a little false that she would know so much about him—who his publisher was, that he had a house in Oxford—and yet not know at all who Bixby was. Despite the fact that he and Bix had long since learned to keep seven inches apart as they walked, there had been photographs and rumors and endless speculation and . . . . 

“Perhaps you would care to join us,” she said.

“Yes,” Bixby said, coldy, pulling out a chair and sitting down. “Yes, I would.”

“Endeavour,” he said, turning to him. “I think you should let my lawyers look over this at least.”

Violetta leaned in toward Bixby, then, and said in a voice barely above a whisper, “I’m sorry. How insensitive of me. I suppose I should have known.”

“Known _what?_ ” Bixby asked.

“Is he . . . . What I mean to say, is, is he allowed to sign for himself?”

 _“What_?” Endeavour cried, outraged.

She turned her dark eyes on him then, liquid with empathy. “One . . . well . . . . one hears things, you know. I never believed such rumors, of course, but . . . But perhaps Mr. Bixby thinks it was rather unfair of me, speaking to you alone like this? Perhaps he thought you might prefer to have the assistance of your . . .”

She gestured to Bixby then, letting the word fall off diplomatically.

“My what? My _keeper?_ ” Endeavour asked, scathingly. “I’m at perfect liberty to sign whatever I like.”

Endeavour took the papers back from Bixby—and who had given him permission to snatch them away in the first place, to take them right from his hand? Bix just didn’t understand. He himself thrived on attention. He never understood how to Endeavour the spotlight was nothing but a constant source of anxiety.

How it was just pure hell. 

And Endeavour wasn’t stupid. It wasn’t _about_ the money. My god. Didn’t they have enough? It had reached the point where Bix spent about as much time considering how he might give it away as he did earning it.

"Endeavour," Bixby sighed, and even the way that he said his name, as a sigh rather than a word, was annoying as hell.

He was doing this. It was his decision. His own. 

And so he took up the pen and completed his signature.

_. . . Morse._

“Endeavour,” Bix protested. But it was too late. He had already added the final word. And he hated all of it, hated signing his name in two parts like that. It was almost as if Endeavour and Morse were two separate people.

“Why would you do that?” Bixby asked. “You don’t even seem to know what your royalties are to be. That was absolutely . . . ”

But what Bix thought that it was, Endeavour did not want to hear.

“It’s not about the money,” Endeavour said, cutting across him. “Everything is always about the money with you, always, always. But it’s never going to be enough, don't you know that? It’s never going to be enough to take you away from there.”

Suddenly, Endeavour felt quite out of breath; his heart was beating light and fast beneath his ribs, as if he’d been running a race, even though he was still sitting in the same chair he had been in since he first came into the restaurant.

Although maybe he _had_ been running. Because it seemed somehow that Bix was far away, his laughing dark eyes suddenly unreadable, distant, as he turned away, considering Violetta.

“Ah,” Bixby said. “Well."

"Admirably well done, my dear.”


	4. "This is a story about love"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been a long time since I updated this, but—with things being as they are—I've found I've been missing this AU and this cozy little corner of AO3. 
> 
> I wrote a few one-shots for them recently, and I was worried that no one would like them because I've taken this AU.... a bit far? Maybe? :D But instead I was so surprised—those fics got such kind and lovely comments, that they really made my day. <3 Thanks y’all! <3
> 
> So anyway, I am bringing this AU Morse and Bixby back, in the hopes there are a few of y'all who still like this universe ... 
> 
> This is the chapter where the tone begins to take a different turn, so I hope you all will like it!  
> And now the prologue finishes her apologies and scurries off the stage.... :0)

They sat in an old aluminum rowboat in the middle of the Brenta River, drifting more than actually rowing, letting the current take them along as it would.

It should have felt like the most delicious sort of contentment, wafting downstream as aimless as a curling wisp of a feather that skims along the surface of the water.....

.... If it hadn’t felt like such an apt metaphor for the unnamable tension that seemed to have sprung up between them. 

It should have been the perfect day, really.

Except that it wasn’t.

Bixby stretched his legs out and leaned back against the curved metal beam that formed the stern of the boat. On a day like this, it was impossible for Bix to feel low for too long, and soon he found that he was happy enough, after all, to wait for Endeavour to be the first to speak—to break the silence that had come to feel like an uneasy truce between them—and, in the meanwhile, to sit and watch the world as it drifted by.

On one shore, a beach pebbled with smooth stones in a mixed array of coppers and grays and umbers yielded to sparse grass and then to trees with barren limbs reaching high into a sky that was as crisp as the cold, a pure and brilliant January blue.

On the opposite, higher and steeper bank, large, flat-roofed houses, terra-cotta-colored or coral pink or mustard yellow, the stucco of their lower floors pocked and cracked from years of rising tides, towered over the moving river like worn old sentinels, watching as bits of fallen sunlight dazzled across the water, such faithful reflections of the sun that they were almost too bright to look upon.

Endeavour, of course, was watching the play of the lights anyway, but whether he was actually _seeing_ them, or simply gazing into the mid-distance, Bixby wasn’t sure. He seemed utterly preoccupied as he sat slumped up against the bow of the boat, one leg pulled up in front of him, the other stretched out along the rim so that one foot dangled carelessly over the edge.

“Trees don’t live in the sky, and clouds don’t swim in the salt seas,” Endeavour murmured, “and fish don’t leap in wheat fields.”

A faint crease formed between Bixby’s brows.

Sweet Jesus.

He should hope not.

“Blood isn’t found in wood, nor sap in stones,” he continued. “By fixed arrangement, all that live and grows submits to limit and restrictions.”

Bixby wasn’t sure what to think. _Blood isn’t found in wood?_ That was rather grim tidings on such a beautiful day, wasn’t it?

Perhaps Endeavour felt it, too, then, that wrongness there, when things weren’t quite square between them.

“What’s that?” Bixby asked.

“The seeds of the universe, the particles from which it’s made, are eternal,” Endeavour said. “They swerve and converge and separate and come together again, creating new things, but they never disappear. There is never more than there is right now, nor less. And so it is that all grows and flourishes so far as each is allowed by the laws of nature.”

“Hmmm,” Bixby said.

That sounded like a nice bit of rationalization for just throwing your hands in the air, accepting things just as they were.

“Who said all this?” Bixby asked.

“Lucretius.”

Bix had never heard of that one; he felt that it put him at rather a disadvantage.

“Until, what, then?” Bix asked. “That can’t be _it._ ”

“There is no ‘until.’ No _‘it._ ’ Time is endless.”

“So what, then? Everything just keeps rolling over and over?”

“Yes,” Endeavour said, heavily, as if Bix were a bit obtuse—which felt rather unfair, really, as Bix had rather thought he had summed it up quite well. “Everything just keeps ‘ _rolling over and over.’_ ” 

Bixby grimaced.

Well. That sounded as dull as paint, didn’t it? What was the point of it? Where was the goal? What was one to reach for as one stood on the edge of a dock, looking out over the water?

But, then again ... it could be completely marvelous. It could mean....

“Ah,” Bixby said, then, cheering considerably, as a new thought struck him. “That means we might be right back here again someday.”

For a moment, Endeavour simply looked at him, his face an utter blank.

“What?” he asked, at last. 

“If there are only a certain number of these …. eternal seeds, or what have you …. never either more or less… and they are constantly rearranging themselves over and over, with infinite time in which to do it… they’ll eventually have to reconvene themselves in just this way….”

“But the possibilities are infinite,” Endeavour protested.

“But you said time is also infinite,” Bix countered. “So, given enough time, they’ll have run through all the combinations, and begin again. You’ll be here, and I’ll be here, and those houses, and those trees, and the sun. Although perhaps I might be wearing different shoes.”

One could dream.

He should have just bought them, those boots he had seen in the window when they were in Florence. He wasn’t quite sure if he could have pulled them off at the time— the buckles were a bit much ... but …

But ... what was he thinking?

Of course, he could have pulled them off.

“You’ll be wearing different _shoes?”_ Endeavour asked, wonderingly. 

“Well,” Bix replied. “There would be bound to be _some_ small thing that wouldn’t be quite the same. After all the odds of that would be astronomical.”

Endeavour said nothing, only gazed at him as if he had been temporarily robbed off all speech.

Then he shook his head, as if there wasn’t any point in arguing with him.

Bixby quirked a smile.

Because Bixby knew better.

The only reason Endeavour had conceded was that he didn’t _have_ a further point.

Otherwise, If he did… he most certainly would have made it.

Endeavour shifted himself upright from where he was slouched, then, took up the oars in his hands and pulled back, sending the boat lurching a length forward in a cascade of sloshing water, a thoughtful frown back on his face.

“Don’t let it worry you, old man,” Bixby said. “Even a Greats scholar is bound to get bested in an argument at least once. Since these eternal particles keep circulating over and over. The odds almost demand it. Any house would call it.”

And to Bix’s surprise, Endeavour laughed.

“It’s all right,” Endeavour said, “All I meant was, is that everything is just as it ought to be. That you couldn’t ask for a more perfect day.”

“Ah,” Bix said.

And on that they could agree. 

“If you say that it is, then it is, old man.”

And suddenly, it was a perfect day, after all.

Bix leaned back, resting his elbows along the ridge of the stern, ready to enjoy the passing scenery. It was the sort of beauty you could get drunk on, really, this pristine sort of winter afternoon, the sky still blue, the sun just striking the trees at that low angle, lighting up their rough bark so that they seemed to glow like unearthly things.

It sort of made Bixby wish he could paint, just so he could capture it, that odd little trick of the light.

Suddenly, he realized that Endeavour was watching him, thoughtfully.

“What is it?” Bix asked.

“I was just wondering… if you might….” he began.

Then he shook his head and leaned back on the oars, sending them another surge forward. 

“Never mind,” he said.

“If I might what?” Bixby asked.

Again, Endeavour pulled back on the oars, wrenching against the water so that the accompanying sloshing ripple almost drowned out his next words. 

“If you might call Turner for me,” he murmured.

Bixby blinked.

The request was so bizarrely out-of-character, that it took him a few seconds to process it.

“Oh, no,” Bix said.

There was no possible world in which he was getting involved in that.

The ironic thing of it was, if Bix had offered to do such a thing, Endeavour would have been at him like a badger with a bad toothache.

_I can tend to my own affairs, I don’t need you interfering in my career, you were the one who got me into this, now leave me alone…_

And Bix was preparing to point out just that, but then, Endeavour was looking so crestfallen, he found didn’t have the heart.

Instead, he sighed.

“Why did you sign?” Bix asked. 

“I dunno…” Endeavour replied. “That tour… I don’t know. I’m just tired. I was just _tired.”_

“You do have a bit of clout now. You could have simply explained that to Turner. He might have understood.”

Endeavour looked incredulous at that, and then he leaned back once more on the oars, sending the boat forward with another jolt, the water sounding in a sibilant rush around them.

“Well, he might,” Bix persisted. “He might have been happy enough to have you just pop up now and again and toss some poems around into the trees. Give him a little publicity that way.”

Endeavour scowled and turned away, looking over his shoulder as he pulled back on the oars. 

“Don’t joke about that,” he said. “That was a horrible day.”

And for that, Bixby had no rejoinder.

He wouldn’t know, really. Since the whole of that summer was just another one of those things that they were never supposed to talk about.

“Well. You had better tell him soon. When are you supposed to be meeting with this Ludo person?” Bix asked.

“I don’t know. Sometime. I’m sure it will be fine. There’s no need for you to say it that way.” 

“What way?”

“As if you’re already certain that it was a mistake, that it will be a fiasco.”

“It seemed as if you were the one having second thoughts,” Bixby countered.

“I’m sure it will be fine,” Endeavour said, as if trying to convince himself. “She said he’ll come right to the house… and I won’t have to bother you for a ride to Paris anymore… ”

“…I never minded giving you a ride….” 

“… It’s an awfully long drive. And I can hardly take the bus or train, what with all Turner’s done. All those posters,” he added with a shudder. “I don’t know why I went along with it. I was just so angry that day with Thursday, that I wasn’t thinking.”

Bixby couldn’t help but quirk a smile at the memory of that promotional poster, the one in which Endeavour was slumped up against a PELICON signal, glaring into the camera with smoldering eyes—he still had a copy of one, hidden in his study, the one that George and Shirley had given him at the pub. 

“Stop it,” Endeavour said.

And Bixby jumped at the sudden shift in tone. It was uncanny, sometimes; it was as if Endeavour could read his very thoughts. 

“Well,” Bixby said. “You could have always hired someone. A chauffeur.”

Endeavour’s face, as he knew it would, fell into an expression of distaste at that suggestion right away.

The idea of paying someone to drive him from Nancy to Paris was anathema. He was always such a tightwad, he’d rather walk, wear out a pair of expensive shoes that cost twice as much as the fare, sleep in the woods overnight, than even to hire a cab.

“Besides, this way I can just stay at home,” Endeavour said. “She said they’d come out to the house, if we needed to discuss anything, or to pick up any drafts or to bring by any proofs.”

Bixby scowled.

That’s right.

Endeavour wouldn’t have to go anywhere.

Or talk to anyone.

It would be just like old times, just like when he had holed himself up in that lake house.

How spectacular.

Still, there was no point in letting it ruin the day.

The thing was done.

“It will be all right,” Bixby said. “You must have wanted to sign it, or else you never would have done it. Not as if I’ve any hope that that blue T-shirt might ever be leaving our lives.”

Endeavour quirked a hint of a smile.

“Sometimes, in business, you have to trust your instincts,” Bixby said.

“Do you really think so?” Endeavour asked.

He looked so hopeful, Bix felt he had no choice but to affirm it. “Of course,” Bixby said. “That’s what I always do. And it’s always worked out for me.” 

And because it didn’t seem quite enough, he went ahead and said it. Even though he would have thought it wasn’t anything that needed saying.

“It’s not true, you know. What she said. No one thinks that. Least of all me.”

Endeavour looked up, surprised. Then he nodded, just once, as if to show he understood they needn’t say more about it, and leaned back on the oars once more, plunging them another boat’s length down the river.

And Bix was right. It would all work out in the end.

Everything always did.

You only get one go around the board, Bix had always said.

Might as well make the most of it.

And now, according to this Lucretius fellow, it seemed as if you might get several—even millions—of chances to look up at into a rare winter blue sky, one as fresh as the promise of a brand-new year, all of which rolled out before you, just waiting for you to turn the page. 

When the story begins, you never know what it’s going to be. It might be a comedy or a tragedy. It all fell on how the cards were dealt.

But one thing that Bixby was certain of was, that this....

This was a story about love.

***

Bixby sat behind his desk, half-swiveling about in his big leather chair, checking over the accounts of a shipping firm based in Marseille. Outside the window, a small sparrow hopped about in the boxwoods, snapping off a twig before flying off in a flash of drab russet across the gardens.

It was the day before Valentine’s Day, and the world was beginning to warm, to soften, to burst with purple crocuses the color of jewels and to quiver with birdsong, to stir back to life.

He was just reaching for a pen to check a few numbers, when the telephone rang, metallic and insistent, on the corner of the desk.

He leaned forward and picked up the receiver.

“Bixby,” he said.

“Bix, It’s Turner.”

“Ah,” Bixby said.

“I need to talk to Endeavour about this hullaballoo.”

“Hullaballoo?” Bix asked, cautiously.

“Antonio Almada died yesterday morning. Don’t you ever turn on the television?”

Bixby said nothing. Turner should know well enough that, now that they were back home in France, where Endeavour stood no chance of catching Mr. Bright’s info spot, that Endeavour had lost all interest in the thing, fallen back on his usual position towards it—that of contempt. Turner had been over enough times to know that it was records that played at their house, and not the telly.

“Who is he?” Bix asked. “This…”

“Antonio Almada. He’s a well-known Portuguese novelist. Haven’t you heard of him?”

Bixby opted to ignore the note of chastisement, eager for Turner to get to his point.

“He was climbing a ladder in his garden, picking some lemons. And the damn rung just broke right under him,” Turner said. “Fell and broke his neck.” 

Bixby raised his eyebrows in sympathy. Good Lord. What a horrible way to go. Senseless, really, and painfully so.

But still, he couldn’t quite see what this unfortunate Portuguese novelist had to do with them in the first place.

Nor why Turner should be calling at all, considering Endeavour wasn’t working for him anymore.

“His publisher has been calling, for tidbits for his obituary,” Turner said. “Anecdotes of his life, testimonials to his writing. I was wondering if I could get a quote from Endeavour. You know. What a great talent he was. How he’ll be sorely missed. They’re driving me mad about it. You know how these people are. Strike while the iron is hot.”

For a moment, Bixby said nothing, confused.

“Strike while the iron is hot? A little late for that, isn’t it? The man’s beyond all help, certainly,” Bixby said.

“You know how it is. There’s always a spike in sales when an author dies. The publicity, the buzz, the wave of nostalgia. The publishers will be wanting to cash in.”

“Oh,” Bixby said.

That was all rather mercenary, wasn’t it? Rather tacky?

If Endeavour had fallen off some ladder, would Turner have been calling up this Almada’s publisher, working on some piece to build up some hype around his life and death, hoping for a spike in sales?

Turner must have heard it, the chill in his voice.

“Not that I don’t think that’s rather tasteless. I think of my writers as family.”

“Hmmmm,” Bixby said.

And it was most likely true: Turner did go to Endeavour’s rescue once, when Endeavour was in Scotland. Of course, he could have been wanting just to squeeze that book he was contracted for out or him, but, nevertheless, he really needn’t have gone that extra mile. It could have all backfired spectacularly. He could have wasted his time searching the village from which Endeavour had called him, only to find that he had long gone, could have had to have flown all the way back to France with nothing to show for it but a wasted journey.

Well, there was no use in denying it.

Endeavour really had been a bit of an ass about the whole thing.

It seemed as if he hadn’t even had the decency to inform the man he’d jumped ship.

“Just a moment,” Bixby said. “I’ll just see if I can find him.”

“Mmmmm,” Turner said, humming in agreement.

Bix set the receiver down on his desk, but finding Endeavour wasn’t all that difficult—he had only to follow the sound of a soaring aria, spiraling and spiraling to dizzying heights, a piece from the opera they had seen at New Year’s, Monteverdi’s L’Ofero.

He went down the hall and came into the drawing room to find Endeavour in his favorite spot, stretched out on the red and ivory Persian carpet, his hands braced behind his head, with one ankle tucked up over one upraised knee.

“Endeavour?”

“Hmmm?”

“Turner’s on the line.”

He seemed to still at that.

“Oh?” he asked.

“Yes,” Bixby said. “Funny thing. He doesn’t seem to know that you aren’t with his house anymore.”

“Oh.”

“Taking this a bit far, aren’t you?”

“I…,” Endeavour began. “I just haven’t found the time to tell him yet.”

“Yes,” Bixby said. “Yes, I can see how busy you’ve been.”

Endeavour rolled over at once and sat up, immediately casting him a dark look, as if to make it known that Bix’s sarcasm was duly noted and not appreciated. 

“Well. What does he want?” Endeavour asked.

“I don’t know,” Bixby said.

What? Was he Endeavour’s secretary now?

“Some man called Antonio Almada died. Turner wants a quote from you.” 

Endeavour’s sharp face softened at once, falling into an expression of thoughtfulness. 

_“Almada?_ He was only in his fifties.”

“He fell off a ladder or something. I don’t know.”

“A _ladder?_ ”

“Hmmmm.”

“Well. I’m sorry to hear the news, but … I don’t know what to say. I hardly knew him, really.” 

“Just say something nice,” Bixby said.

“Mmmmm.”

Endeavour looked uncertain, as if that sounded like a lot of hard work.

“It’s an obituary, for God’s sake," Bixby said. "Just say how his words changed lives, how he'll be missed by all who knew him and loved his work.”

Endeavour snorted, clearly unimpressed.

“No platitude knowingly unexpressed.”

“It’s what we _say,_ Endeavour. When we don’t know what to say.”

“But we do know what to say. We just can’t stomach saying it.”

“And what’s that?”

“Thank Christ it wasn’t me.”

The words gave Bixby pause.

He did have a point, as much as it pained him to admit it.

It was, terribly enough, one of the first thoughts he had had, wasn’t it? To imagine it might have been Turner calling another publishing house to ask its writers about Endeavour? And—had it been his imagination?—or hadn’t he listened for it, that strain of opera coming from the other room, that reassuring proof of Endeavour’s presence somewhere about the house?

“Well,” Bixby said, dryly, recovering himself. “It’s a good thing we don’t have any lemon trees in the garden, then, isn’t it?”

Endeavour scowled and rose to his feet. He looked cross as two sticks, but still, he followed Bixby back to his study, where the heavy black receiver still lay on the desk.

He picked it up, and, straight away, he asked, “What happened, exactly?” 

Bixby rolled his eyes.

“Was he alone at the time?” Endeavour asked.

“So he actually died yesterday morning.”

“Who found the body?”

“You aren’t investigating the man’s death,” Bixby hissed. “He just wants a quote. Just say something nice.”

Endeavour waved a hand and turned away, as if shielding himself and the telephone receiver with his bony shoulder, so as to tune him out.

And then, over the faint background noise of Endeavour’s still-playing opera record, the door bell rang.

Ah, to hell with it.

Bixby stalked off towards the door, leaving Endeavour to his “inquiries.”

It was a mercy, really.

If they were going to end up on a plane to Lisbon, to go and have a look at this ladder, or to see how many plates the man had laid out on his table, or to see whether his pet parrot had anything to say on the matter, Bix honestly didn’t want to know.

He went to the door and wrenched it open, and, much to Bixby’s surprise, it was a stranger there on the threshold, and not a neighbor from down in the village, at the door. 

The man had careless dark hair and a dark beard, and was wearing a brown jacket that was so much like one he owned that he almost felt as if he were looking at some alternate version of himself, like his understudy in a play, or an actor filling his same role, but in a different season—close, but with definite mistakes.

“Ludo Talenti,” he said.

He sailed into the foyer, then, and peeled off his brown leather coat, handing it to him as if he were staff, and revealing the silk shirt underneath: it was an eye-blistering thing in a bold red and orange and green print—splashed with scenes of gondolas and Eiffel towers and Acropolises, the likes of which Bix had never seen. 

“I’m here to see Endeavour Morse,” he said.

Bixby frowned, considering him.

He knew he should invite the man in, have him wait, perhaps, in Endeavour’s study.

But there was something there that left Bixby feeling uneasy, as if a ghost had crossed his grave—almost akin to some premonition of evil, as if he stood in the crosshairs as cold eyes watched him from amidst white tombstones, laughing at his plight.

It must have been that shirt.

It was distressing, really.

There was no real way to wrap one’s head around the thing.

It looked sort of like ….

It looked sort of like a _tablecloth._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bixby did go back and get those shoes. His picture is on my tumblr if you'd like to see how happy he is with them!
> 
> Also thank you to visionsofmangoes for the “hijinks” tag! XD


	5. "Every man has his price"

“I’m sorry,” Bixby said, extending his hand. “I don’t think we’ve been introduced. I’m Joss Bixby.”

Ludo Talenti reached out and clasped his palm, looking into his eyes with a liquid and intense sincerity, and then shook his hand in a way that seemed to convey far more than a handshake between two acquaintances of merely a few minutes really ought to, in Bix’s humble opinion.

“Oh, yes. Joss. I’ve heard all about you, of course.”

A statement that might be taken any number of ways.

And what did the man presume to know about him, exactly?

None of his damn business, really.

Ludo Talenti flashed a warm smile dripping with what was meant to be Mediterranean charm, as if knew he had overstepped with the casual drop of his Christian name, but was sure he’d be granted indulgence. 

“Mr. Morse is on the telephone,” Bixby replied—not unkindly, he hoped, but nevertheless making the gentle correction clear.

Even Endeavour scarcely ever called him ‘Joss.’ Bix certainly wasn’t about to let this fellow start tossing their names about as if he owned the things.

“Ah,” Talenti replied.

“You can wait for him in the drawing room, if you’d like,” Bixby said. He indicated the room to the left with a small nod of his head and stepped back, allowing Talenti further into the foyer. Then he turned, leading him down the hall and into a room which lay bright with the slant of the late winter sun, the tall windows casting three long rectangles of light onto the red and ivory Persian carpet.

As soon as Talenti crossed the threshold of the room, he let out a dramatic little cry of delight, brushing past Bix’s shoulder to make a beeline straight for Endeavour’s basket of records, which sat pulled out from under the table holding his record player, left by the sofa on the floor.

Bixby was about to warn him against it…

But, not feeling particularly well-disposed towards the man, and doubting he had the good manners to concede even if Bix _did_ tell him he would be better off leaving Endeavour’s records alone, he decided …. well ….

On his own head be it.

Talenti crouched down beside the basket, thumbing through the albums, emitting small sounds of approval whenever he came upon one that particularly struck his fancy.

“Music is my passion,” he extolled.

Bix leaned casually against the doorframe. “It’s all right,” he replied.

Talenti shot him an oddly pitying look, before his face changed, as if he had understood something. 

“Of course. You men of business. All prosaic ledgers and figures. Both feet firmly on the ground, plodding along. I’m sure its more subtle nuances and delights must escape you utterly.”

Oh, Sweet Jesus.

Were they really doing this, then?

“Ah, now I have offended you,” Talenti said. 

Bixby said nothing, only shrugged with his old easy grace.

“You’ll have to forgive me,” Talenti said. “It just seems rather.... perplexing. Endeavour is an artist, after all. It’s difficult to imagine what you might have in common. Still. What is the phrase? ‘Opposites attract?’”

From Talenti’s urbane and conspiratorial smile, Bixby understood at once that his initial impression wasn’t wrong. From the way he looked at him, as if sizing him up, Bix thought that he understood _exactly_ what he had presumed about him and Endeavour.

Just as if it ever was, or ever could be, any of his concern.

In some corner of his mind—the part that seemed to play things over, imagining how Endeavour might perceive them—Bixby could almost see it, Endeavour rolling his eyes. Firstly, at the general presumptuousness of the man, and secondly because there was little Endeavour hated more than the stereotype of the anemic artist, swooning with sensitivity in his ivy-covered garret, his poems coming to him fully-made in a lightning strike of sudden inspiration, bursting forth as a goddess from the sea, rather than by the dull labor of being laid out brick by brick, word by word.

“He wasn’t always a writer,” Bixby said.

“No?”

“No. He used to be a policeman.”

Talenti made a small face of distaste at that, as if even hearing of such a grubby little profession was somehow repugnant.

Then, Bixby could scarcely believe it: the man actually took the record Endeavour had been listening to off the turntable and placed it aside on the sofa cushion, pulling another disc from its sleeve and popping it into its place.

And, coincidentally enough, he somehow managed to single out the one record that Bixby had noticed long ago that Endeavour never chose to play.

Talenti set the arm of the turntable down, and, in a few moments, the room hummed with the steady, revolving sound of the needle travelling across blank grooves, until a swell of stringed instruments followed by a woman’s thin soprano filled the air, soaring to heights that made the room seem larger somehow, as if it had expanded, trying to contain it all.

Talenti looked longingly out the window as he listened, his face taking on a melancholy cast, as if in sympathy to the music, as if his heart was surging, struggling with torrents of emotion that he could not possibly express.

It was awkward as hell. It was almost indecent, just standing there, watching the orgiastic flights of feeling playing so plainly across the man’s face.

Bix straightened from where he was leaning in the doorframe and meandered over to look out the window, the one out of which Talenti was gazing with dazed eyes as the music, evidently, shook his soul to pieces.

“It’s been lovely lately, hasn’t it?” Bixby asked, falling on that old safe standby of the weather. “The worst of the winter is clearly over.”

Talenti paused in his love affair with Endeavour’s record long enough to look at him astutely. 

“We have a saying in my country,” he said. “Do not praise the day until the sun goes down.”

“Oh? And what country is that, old man?” Bixby asked.

Ludo Talenti certainly was an enigmatic name.

Suddenly, Bix was struck with the sense that perhaps everything about the man was a ruse, that his quasi-Continental ennui was a bit overdone, a façade, an exaggerated stereotype more suited to a character in a play than to a real person.

Perhaps Ludo Talenti was really Larry Tate from Liverpool or Birmingham.

Or perhaps ... perhaps he was even from Birmingham in the same way in which Bix was “from Oxford.”

Perhaps, he originally hailed from just a state away, from Birmingham, Alabama.

It certainly would be supremely funny if the both of them were speaking to one another in acquired accents.

Talenti frowned, seeming to mull over how best to answer the question. Then he shrugged, as if the matter were of little importance.

“War has redrawn the national borders so many times as to make such notions an irrelevance,” he said.

“Well… it must be called something,” Bix protested.

“Ah,” he said, looking at him again with something akin to pity.

And then he laughed, a low chuckle that was somehow decidedly unpleasant.

“I shouldn’t trouble you with it,” Talenti said. “Someone from your country probably couldn’t find it on a map, anyway.”

“Who are you?” came a sharp voice from the hall.

Bix and Talenti turned at once to see Endeavour standing there in the corridor, looking as cross as two sticks.

Endeavour had been in a rather quiet frame of mind ever since they’d gotten back from Venice. Having talked to Turner—a conversation that might have gone any number of ways depending on how forthcoming Endeavour had chosen to be— he had most likely had his fill of social interaction for the day, and was looking forward to returning to his sanctuary, only to find it had been blithely invaded.

“Ludo Talenti,” the man said, in the same irritating manner his wife had, of pronouncing his name as if it were an awful lot of work. “Talenti and Talenti Publishing.”

“What are you doing here? Your wife said you were based in Oxford,” Endeavour said.

A place, no doubt, to which Endeavour had no intention of returning until he felt ready to deal with the new company. Could be in a month. Could be in three. Perhaps he had been waiting quietly, trying to bide his time until his old contract had run out, so that he could make the transition without greater consequences or hard feelings.

Talenti spread his hands wide, ingratiatingly apologetic in the face of Endeavour’s blunt and even accusatory tone.

“I happened to be in Paris. So, I thought …. why not take a drive? I always meet all our new authors, to discuss plans.”

Endeavour said nothing. Then his eyes fell upon the record player, the new tightness in his jaw not abating in the slightest as he watched the record revolve slowly around the turntable, the soprano’s spiraling aria soaring on.

“Forgive me,” Talenti said. “But I simply could not resist, when I saw it. The Calloway ’54 Traviata from LaScala. I’ve never heard it.”

“Very few have,” Endeavour said. “It’s a test pressing. They were trying out some new recording system.”

“Ah,” he said. “Well. It’s far more beautiful than I would have imagined. I hope you don’t mind…”

“No,” Endeavour said, tersely, and there was a coldness written into the sharp lines of his face that was hard for Bix to read. “In fact, you can have it.”

Talenti froze. “You are joking. I can have it? Do you know how rare it is?”

“I haven’t listened to it for years,” Endeavour replied. “I’d sooner it went to a good home.”

As if to illustrate his point, he went over to the turntable and took the needle off the record in an oddly abrupt manner; it was almost as if he were cutting off a grating fire alarm.

He slipped it into the sleeve and handed the record over without another word. Bixby couldn’t say he was not surprised—Endeavour wasn’t exactly known for his generosity—nor could Bix tell whether his curt manner was due to the fact that it pained him to give the record away, or if it was because he was glad to be well shot of it.

Talenti took the record, bestowing upon Endeavour a shining-eyed look of wonder, as though thoroughly touched by the gesture.

“I cannot possibly accept such a gift without showing my deepest gratitude. Are you free, this afternoon?” He looked Endeavour up and down, then, taking in his T-shirt and worn jeans. “It appears that you must be,” he chortled. 

A flicker of uncertainty twitched across Endeavour’s face.

“Free to do what?”

“To come up to Paris,” Talenti replied, as if it were the most natural conclusion possible. “I’ve taken the liberty of making a reservation at a little place I know. We can discuss plans for your next book. And I can answer any questions you might have about the company. We can get to know one another properly at last.”

Endeavour glanced about the room, as if searching for some fault with it and finding none.

“We can talk here just as well as anywhere else.”

Talenti tut-tutted at that, as if that were an option that he simply could not allow.

“That’s hardly any welcome,” he said. “Please. I insist.”

Then, he lowered his voice, as if taking Endeavour into his deepest confidences.

“My Violetta always turns a blind eye to the accounts when it’s a new author. She likes for us to make an impression. We’ll shoot the works! That is a saying, no?” he asked, flashing a jovial, white grin.

Endeavour merely stood there, looking rather pained, as if all of his hopes were going down in flames around him.

Bix had understood that the whole point of signing the new contract was so that he …

Well.

So that he wouldn’t have to go to any lunches in Paris.

Endeavour considered the man for a long while, and then, infuriatingly enough, he looked straight to him, to Bix, as if in a silent plea for him to think of something, to get him off the hook somehow.

But what was he supposed to say?

Sorry? He’s got a dentist appointment?

Endeavour had certainly made it clear that he hadn’t wanted any part of what he had to say when he had signed that contract. And now that the deed was done, he would have to talk to these people sooner or later.

If he had bothered to put on something other than one of those ratty T-shirts and a pair of jeans, he might have made some sort of convincing excuse. As it was, it was as clear as day he was planning on doing nothing but to hang about the house .... just as he had been for weeks, like some sort of fugitive from justice.

“I’m … well… I’m not really dressed for …” Endeavour began.

“Nonsense,” Talenti said. “You of all people don’t need to worry about that. You’re a trend-setter, aren’t you? I can remember still the summer of ‘The Poetry in the Woods.’ Couldn’t throw a stone in Paris without hitting someone trying to emulate your style.”

Endeavour’s face fell further at the mention of that summer, as if he was finding the whole ordeal of speaking to the man more painful by the minute.

“Come! We’ll get a bottle of Chateau Latour,” Talenti said. “You won’t regret it. I promise you.”

And then, even Bixby—who was rather quicker on his feet when it came to such situations than Endeavour was—felt blind-sided by what happened next. Talenti reached out to cup Endeavour’s shoulder, seeming almost to scoop him up alongside of him, and began guiding him out toward the hall. It was a strangely familiar gesture, leaving Bix with a sense of déjà vu that he could not place, until he realized that it was he himself who had once done much the same, whisking Endeavour off from where they had stood before a lit canvas, off into the heart of a party, in a haze of red lights.

Once Talenti had led Endeavour off into the foyer, he stopped only to take a coat from off the hook of the antique wooden stand by the door, bundling it into Endeavour’s arms, while all the while prattling on about the glories of the “little place he had found” so that Endeavour could not get a word of protest in edgewise.

As the door closed behind them, Endeavour cast one last look over his shoulder, as if to ask if there wasn’t some way he couldn’t get him out of this dreaded thing, but Bix, for once, was so stunned by the audacity of it all that he was rendered quite speechless. It had all happened so fast, somehow—their departure at once shockingly abrupt, and yet, in the whirlwind of the man’s casual and chatty and aggressively pleasant manner, the most natural thing in the world.

For a long moment, Bixby simply stood there at the threshold of the drawing room, the house oddly silent, wondering what, exactly, had just happened.

He had always been after Endeavour to get out of the house a bit more, but, now that he had been almost bundled off— without so much as the chance even to get used to the idea, which for Endeavour was always important first step—he felt rather ambivalent about it.

And, not to mention.....

Those delicate, searching questions about them, those smoldering, meaningful looks....

Was this Ludo person taking Endeavour to a business meeting …?

Or … was this a _date?_

And what the hell did he mean by that, _someone from his country_ couldn’t even find it on a map?

***

Endeavour sat at a small table covered with an elegant white cloth, as all around him couples sat sipping glasses of red wine, trading shy smiles, or else leaning a chin longingly into a cupped palm, so as to hang upon the other’s every word, each immersed in their own sweet murmur of conversation.

The restaurant seemed an odd choice of venue for their meeting, a place more suited to romance than to business, the elegant rooms dim save for the shaded lamps that glowed soft gold on every table, casting the gilt-embellished wallpaper into a warm and honey-colored light.

It felt strange to be in such a place, sitting across from a complete stranger. He felt vaguely miserable, actually, as if he were missing him already.

Turner never made him go through any sort of song and dance like this.

Still, it was too late now, he supposed. He could never back out of this new agreement without completely losing face. 

He wasn’t even sure now what had made him do something so impulsive. It had just driven him mad that morning, the way they had begun to discuss him in the third person. It was absolutely infuriating, the implication that he couldn’t be trusted to make his own decisions.

Later, he had felt almost queasy, remembering the way he had hurled out those words at Bix, touching on what he knew to be his greatest fear, even though they never spoke of it, and in front of an audience, too. Later, he felt as if he had gone too far.

If only he had not made such a point of it, not turned it into a hill to die on....

Ah, well.

_Paes ofereode, pisses swa maeg._

That, too, was overcome. So may this be. 

“Another bottle?” Ludo said.

“Oh,” Endeavour said. “No.”

Ludo cast a glance over his shoulder, looking to where a waiter, young and clearly ill-at-ease in his stiff evening suit, stood against a wall near the fireplace, and raised one finger, ordering another bottle anyway.

“You know….” Ludo began, surveying him with a thoughtful eye. “I think we might have been up together… You were at….”

“Lonsdale,” Endeavour supplied.

Ludo’s face broke into a fond smile, tinged with nostalgia.

“That’s right. And I was at Beaufort.” He took a sip of wine and set the glass carefully on the table, just as if he were placing a piece on a game board. “And you sang with TOSCA, didn’t you?”

Endeavour nodded, uncertainly. It was unlikely that Ludo would have remembered him, one face in the crowd of a large choir. Most likely, he’d gotten all of these little tidbits from Jerome Hogg’s salacious biography.

Wonderful.

Who knew what the man must think of him?

“Yes,” Endeavour said. 

The waiter returned then to the table, presenting a bottle of red wine so that Ludo might assess the label.

“Perfect.”

The young man went to pour, but Ludo smiled and shook his head, as if to shoo him away, before taking the bottle himself and sloshing a generous amount into Endeavour’s glass, leaving the waiter to give an awkward half-bow and back away. 

“Yes,” Ludo said, without missing a beat, his voice full of fond remembrance. “I enjoyed many of TOSCA’s concerts when I was up. Music is my life. My grand passion. Second only to the dogged pursuit of beautiful women.”

He chuckled softly and then asked, “You would say this, ‘dogged pursuit’ in English?’

“Yes, we would,” Endeavour assured him.

“Well, there you are. Such are the articles of my faith.”

“Ah,” Endeavour replied. “None better.”

Ludo leaned back in his chair and tilted his head nearly sideways, as if to look at him from some other angle, reassessing him, and then he smiled conspiratorially, as though admitting him into some private little club.

Presumably one whose members shared in a passion for the dogged pursuit of beautiful women.

Presumably, because Ludo wasn’t quite sure whether or not that was an interest they might ever have had in common.

Endeavour scowled, feeling less well-disposed towards the man by the second. Most probably he had read Jerome’s book, then, as that—from what Endeavour had seen of the thing—seemed to be its driving question. Had he or hadn’t he? Would he or wouldn’t he?

Endeavour took a long drink of the wine and looked around, searching to see if there was any sort of clock in the place, vaguely wondering if they had spent enough time chatting to suggest getting back to the house, to suggest calling it a day. But, of course, there wasn’t one.

There was never a clock in places like this, where they lowered the lights so as to make you feel as if you were in some other, golden cloud of a world, lost in the strains of a single violin, in the heady scent of coffee, so that you would forget all about the world outside its honey-gold glowing walls, so that you would call for another bottle of wine, order a round of velvet chocolate desserts to share—running up the bill, adrift in the land of the Lotus eaters.

“You misunderstand me,” Ludo said, his ingratiating manner back again, leading Endeavour to realize that his impatience must have shown clear on his face.

“Please,” he said. “You must not think …”

He broke off, then, with a husky chuckle and cast him another white smile, his dark eyes growing darker with what almost seemed to be—much to Endeavour’s stunned dismay—a trace of smolder, an edge of desire.

“When we find someone attractive,” he said, lowering his voice to a purr, “we find them attractive, no? It’s quite simple. The heart decides.”

Endeavour felt his face flush, a slow wash of warmth rising from his throat to his hairline, and took another drink.

Truth be told, he could have done without the prolonged and probing look that Ludo Talenti had bestowed upon him whilst saying those words, but…

“Come, come,” Ludo admonished, delivering two playful slaps to the back of his hand. “We’re men of the world, aren’t we?”

Endeavour swallowed and gave a tight smile.

“And what do you do in the world?” he replied.

It was one of Bix’s oldest tricks; when someone hovered too near a topic you didn’t care to discuss, simply flip the conversation around. People loved more than anything to talk about themselves, and Endeavour had the feeling that that rule might well apply to the man before him even more than to most.

And sure enough, he was not disappointed. Ludo leaned back in his chair and tilted his head once more, seeming to flow along with the shift in tone, eyeing him benevolently.

“Travel, mostly. Conferring with writers, finding new talent. My family’s been in publishing since Gutenberg invented the printing press.”

He smiled at his own little joke and took another sip of wine.

“And I look after the various arms of our charitable foundation. I have a music festival as well. I have one scheduled this summer, in Oxford. You should come. You’d enjoy it.”

“Oh,” Endeavour said. “I’m not planning to go to Oxford this summer.”

“Don’t count your chickens before they are hatched,” Ludo quipped.

“That idiom doesn’t quite fit in that context,” Endeavour said. 

“No?”

“No. ‘Don’t count your chickens’ means you can’t count on something before it happens, that you can’t trust to luck or to chance. But whether I go to Oxford or not has nothing to do with chance. It’s entirely my choice. There’s a difference.”

“Is there?” Ludo asked. He tipped his head back and drained his glass. Then, he set it aside. 

“Well. As much as I hate to bring matters back down to the mundane, I’m afraid we must talk business, tedious as it is.”

He gave another wry smile, a smile gleaming all the whiter against his dark beard.

“Although, I’m sure you must be accustomed to that.”

He took up the bottle and refilled their glasses, giving Endeavour ample time to process that last. Ludo seemed to think he had made some sort of apt little witticism, but Endeavour didn’t …

Oh.

Endeavour took another drink. What an ass the man was, really.

Rather a cheap shot, wasn’t it?

“I always say, there are two types of writers,” Ludo began, airily, contemplating the frescoed ceiling and leaving Endeavour with the definite feeling that he was about to be treated to a little lecture. “The dull-by-the book sort, those who plod along, giving their public what they expect, and those who innovate, who test boundaries, who break tradition, who aren’t afraid to meet a new decade head-on. In short…” He leaned forward, then, rubbing his thumb and index finger together pointedly, “those who understand the only form of language actually worth a damn. So. Which type are you?”

Endeavour regarded him uncertainly. A rather extraordinary statement from a publisher, wasn’t it?

“I…. I don’t think I’m either of those, actually. I’m not really interested in any of that. I simply want to write something…. well. That’s not rubbish, I suppose.” 

Ludo laid one palm flat on the table as if bracing himself from a startling impact, a look of theatrical disbelief on his face.

“Well. One of the last of the true artists of the modern age. Incorruptible? Is that it?”

“I suppose,” Endeavour said. “I wouldn’t want to write something provocative simply for the sake of being provocative ... if that’s what you’re getting at.”

Ludo laughed. “I’m not ‘getting at’ anything, I assure you.”

“Aren’t you?”

“Goodness. What motives you ascribe to me.”

Endeavour shrugged. “ _Testing boundaries, meeting a new decade head-on_. It just seems as if you are trying to say something without saying it, is all.”

“Does it? And what is it that you imagine I’m saying, just as a matter of interest?” Ludo asked, a smile playing about his mouth as he raised his glass to his lips.

“I think you’re saying that you want me to write more about sex,” Endeavour replied.

Ludo snorted into his glass. Then, he coughed raggedly, as if he had gotten some of the wine up his nose and was trying to clear his breathing passages. He wiped his face with a napkin, recovering himself.

“They say that it’s the job of an artist to tell lies that tell the truth. I suppose it’s also true that sometimes they cut right to the chase.”

Endeavour grimaced. If the man was going to sit here and misquote Picasso to him, they’d long since reached the point where he was wasting his time.

“Oh, don’t be offended,” he said. “I admire your honesty. And your … authenticity, shall we say? But still, you must admit. Every man has his price,” Ludo chuckled. 

And then his face turned solemn.

“Every man.” 

A moment of awkwardness followed, in which Ludo sat looking at him so intently that Endeavour couldn’t tell if the man was having one on him or if he was dead in earnest.

For a moment, Endeavour began to wonder if he had truly signed a pact with some sort of Mephistopheles.

And then—just when he was beginning to feel decidedly uneasy—Ludo broke into a broad and guileless smile, one that reached his dark eyes with a reassuring warmth, as if it was all just a game, after all. 

“Every man has his weakness. I shall make it my life’s business to find yours,” he said, with a ripple of mirth that undercut his ominous words. “And once I have found your weakness, I shall exploit it without mercy to my own ends.”

“And what is that?” Endeavour asked, evenly.

“I shall think of something.”

He laughed again, pleased with himself, and Endeavour, feeling he had cottoned on to the odd man’s style at last, volleyed back to him.

“And what’s your weakness?”

“My weakness?” Ludo asked.

There was a pause.

Endeavour could see at once that he hadn’t been expecting the question, that he had been caught off-guard. And, almost at once, it felt as if something had changed in the air between them.

Then, Ludo cast his dark gaze down and traced the ridge of his glass with his finger.

“My weakness left me,” he murmured.

Endeavour said nothing. It had been the only glimmer in their long and playful conversation that felt real, the only grain of truth hidden within the farce, and Endeavour wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. He found himself looking away from the raw pain and regret marked so clearly on Ludo Talenti’s face, so as to give the man a moment of privacy, a moment to collect himself. 

As he sat, looking at some fixed point over the fireplace, Endeavour found himself remembering New Year’s morning at the hotel restaurant in Venice, when Violetta Talenti had seemed to flirt with him in exactly the same manner in which her husband been had all afternoon—the purr in her voice, the teasing reprimand when he hadn’t bought her a cheap, fabric rose, the double-edged banter meant to befuddle the object of her affection or designs, the treachery of images that turned the truth inside out and backwards.

They were both masters at the same game, it would seem.

What a pair they were, really.

Were lines ever crossed? It seemed as if certainly they must be. Bizarrely enough, now that he thought about it, he almost felt as if—if he had given any hint of encouragement—he might have gone to bed with either one of them.

But it was all as Ludo had said. A bold new decade. It was all in fun.

Of course, it was all fun.

Until someone gets hurt.

Behind all of Ludo Talenti’s posturing, it seemed, there was perhaps an overriding loneliness, one that Endeavour had once known and could all too well understand.

“I’m sorry,” Endeavour said.

Ludo nodded, accepting his sympathies, his mouth a tight line rather than its usual flashing smile. After that, neither of them said anything more. What was there to say? It was quite a confession, exposing plain the depths of his unhappiness, after a mere few hours of acquaintance. A pall of melancholy seemed to engulf their table, then, like a dark cloud gathering amidst the honey-gold beams of light, and leaving them drenched with it. 

Endeavour wasn’t at all surprised when Ludo called for the cheque. But, as relieved as he was to be going, it somehow felt like a hollow victory. It was true that he had wanted to make it clear—amidst the man’s aggressive pleasantries and probing questions and voracious looks that made him to feel as if he were a thing to be devoured—that he was not to be pushed.

But, neither in pushing back, had he meant to push the man all the way down. And now that Endeavour was on his way to finding himself free of his company, he found himself feeling contrite, oddly sorry for him.

The silence between them remained as they rose from the table, and it was only until they stopped to pick up their coats that Endeavour felt the tension gathering in the pit of his stomach begin to ease.

By the time evening fell, he would be back in his favorite room in the world, listening to his records. And he’d tell Bix all about this strange meeting, and—in the light of the drawing room, the sky falling to indigo outside the windows—the sinister edges of the afternoon would fade away. It would be a mere lark, a harmless misadventure, an odd tale of eccentricity, the sort of story Bix always loved to hear. 

Home was still hours away, but, as he ran his arms through the sleeves of the heavy black wool coat that Ludo had snatched up as they were leaving the house—blithely unaware of his mistake as he had done so—Endeavour already felt as if he was halfway there, a light glowing within him even as he sank his hands into the warm and and silk-lined pockets of a coat that was not his, but actually Bix’s, but which nevertheless seemed to suit him perfectly, that seemed to fit him even better than his own.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And now I’ve made tomorrow Valentine‘s Day ... sort of a bittersweet day for this verse. I’ll have to give Bix and Morse a day of fluff before Strange calls with more problems :D
> 
> Also, Morse, I wouldn‘t waste too much time feeling sorry for Ludo necessarily....


End file.
